So people have problems with computers. At least when they have the problem with Linux or MacOS they learn about their computer and not some black magic MS-centric IT knowledge that's changed every 3 years for no apparent reason. I agree the technical hurdles are a problem, but not as big as you might imagine.
I don't see any original work or links to peer reviewed science, just some shoddy amazon link to a book that the article was apparently summarizing.
The Hudson Institute is not a scientific entity and has no authority whatsoever on this topic. It is an old school right wing think tank, which apparently means they're incapable of understanding anyway. Try linking me to these supposed Nature or Science articles that they allude to in the article. My bet is that he used slight of tongue and there are no such articles refuting the IPCC's findings but perhaps scientific discussions on improving the models.
The author of this book, Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Dennis Avery, is apparently a sellout just like the rest of the "scientists" that claim the IPCC is largely incorrect. Sure, the IPCC may have gotten a few things a little bit off, but for the most part their view is current in climate science.
So I take it that your position is to do nothing, let some lazy ass rich people just go about business like nothing is wrong and Everything is Okay, shit happens, who cares? Who cares what the entire field of climate science agrees on, I'd rather listen to Michael Crichton and FOX News when it comes to Global Warming.
Sheesh... I am less surprised by this viewpoint every time I hear it. The vast marketing budgets make sense because if you can control what people think or feel, that's worth all the money you can afford to spend as a business. Welcome to consumer America where we have belief systems galore, available in all shapes an sizes. You bought the wrong one. Take it back.
You must be joking... you mean you haven't been listening to overwhelming majority of scientists on the matter? If maybe that wasn't enough, allow me to pull a favorite of mine out of the executive summary for policy:
The understanding of anthropogenic warming and cooling influences on climate has improved since
the Third Assessment Report (TAR), leading to very high confidence7 that the globally averaged net
effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming, with a radiative forcing of +1.6 [+0.6 to
+2.4] W m-2. (see Figure SPM-2). {2.3. 6.5, 2.9} And if those words are too complicated let me bring out the crayons:
# Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.
# Most of (>50% of) the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely (confidence level >90%) due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations.
# The probability that this is caused by natural climatic processes alone is less than 5%.
# Both past and future anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions will continue to contribute to warming and sea level rise for more than a millennium.
# Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values over the past 650,000 years Now can we get on to solving the problem already? We've wasted more man-hours tilling over conservative think tank bullshit than it'd have taken to deal with this.
So back to the point I was making earlier, yes indeed, it shall cost industry money in order to scrub greenhouse gases. That's not to say they can't profit or at least salvage some value from the results. According to Dr. Hans Ziock at Los Alamos National Labs it'd cost about $0.25 per gallon of gasoline to capture the CO2. I'm sure some ridiculously low percentage taken from any modern day CEO's salary is more than enough to fund such responsible business practices. A hamper on the economy? Please... we have bigger fish to fry in that arena, too, but nobody seems to notice those either (hedge fund rape or "good" business is diametrically opposed to innovation). Funny how that works out so we end up discussing "the issues" while it does nothing for anyone except cause a stalemate, which in turn allows rich people get richer in the usual ways and everything else to stay the same or get worse. Welcome to Capitalism: where the dollar is God.
Not quite. Waste is waste, and eliminating waste is the key to any process whether it be manufacturing or R&D. The technology is available to do this and becomes extremely viable on the mass production side of things. Imagine this: CO2 scrubbers in all the stacks, which recover the CO2 thereby allowing the companies to sell it off to PraxAir and other gas distributors. One man's garbage is another man's treasure. The economic implications of reducing waste, are, well, good. Try again...
You've been reading too much Crichton. Your level of doubt for the climate scientists and their ability to discern correct information from data is unhealthy. If it is my job to correctly understand and read temperature throughout time and make predictive models, don't you think I'd have this doubt? Wouldn't I want to calibrate the temperatures to known standards? Oh wait, you're talking about thousands and thousands of data points all averaged out and you're worried about a few weather stations being off? You've chosen what to believe, but just understand that you've bought into a load of shit from a bunch of rich old asshats with nothing better to do than to destroy the world for the future children they never had.
I think this is an interesting situation that we're not really considering completely. The Church is not an entity that exists for the sake of capitalism, though has adapted to exist within such a system. To say that the Church is motivated to generate income, while true, does not explain why their need for money as implicitly as say, Enron. Will the Church do "evil" by sheltering their nest egg that allows them to exist within a capitalist world? Not quite... but does having a multi-billion dollar international corporate conglomerate avoiding US taxes but generating most of their income via the US is, generally speaking, unethical. So in the sense that the Pope is protecting the interests of his own, sure, he's definitely playing the international finances game for the benefit of the Catholic Church. He seems to be drawing a line for the multinational corporations in terms of ethics, which seems to be an unexplored topic.
Regardless of any perceived hypocrisy, it seems we might do better to focus on what the Pope is saying instead of killing the messenger. International corporateering is an issue, and will only become more of an issue in the future if nothing is done about it. There's no need for companies to sell to the US while existing within the US at all. The thought of all of the large US companies doing that ought to have a chilling effect on the back of your neck. We're basically getting raped and pillaged by our own beloved capitalism. Viva la mano invisible!
Just like we don't see MOST of the stories submitted to/. there ought to be a better form of sifting through the comments. For the most part I enjoy having all comments available, it's just a pain in the ass when you actually want to see the discussion. So I say make smarter filters or better filters that allow you to put the SPAM back in the can, so to say.
I mean the original TeX, not LaTeX. I could never get used to the "n" pass processing that LaTeX does while Tex uses 1 pass. It also kind of bothered me that LaTeX adds no functionality to TeX... oh well, anyway, does anyone still use plain TeX?
After getting lazily deleted enough times, moderate the account. E.g. he posts, the post doesn't appear until it's seen as something not a waste of time.
Whether or not it is science and whether or not it can be falsified has potentially little to do with whether or not it's right. Actually, it has everything to do with whether it's right. If a concept is not falsifiable, it cannot be True, so how does that potentially have little to do with being right?
I support the scientific process, but if the scientific process is going to take precedence over even considering what may be right, then science is becoming a religion and that's not good. Some of us intuitively use the scientific method every day in order to discern truth in the sea of information. This is not a bad thing. It's sound reasoning based on evidence and observation. I'm not sure how you make the leap from "I'm competent at discerning truth" to "I belong to a religion of truth". And even if you were to say the scientific establishment is that religious institution, then I'd be forced to say what religion changes based on the scientific method? Full circle back to the basic principles of reality and truth. If it's not testable, falsifiable, or verifiable, then it's impossible to know it with any certainty.
Whether or not I.D. is science, I think it makes sense to at least mention the possibility in the same class that discusses evolution. Whether it's science or not and whether you like it or not, the topics are related and it makes sense that they be presented together. What should be mentioned in class is how some theocrats attempted to subvert the interest of the American public by dividing them and setting them to fight amongst each other so that they can get away with murder in politics. ID is not science. It belongs in church, sunday school, PSR, etc. and NOT in a science classroom.
Whoa, post spam! This has been posted already. Verbatim. Fits into my argument (above somewhere) that it's all just a pile of spam. Repeated posting is something spammers do. Oh, and FYI, if you actually believe it, don't post AC.
*yawn* And this post is a classic example of what's difficult in discussing Truth: use an inordinate volume of words to draw attention away from the issues at hand while simultaneously convincing the less scrupulous of us that the arguments hold true. This tactic is very useful for those who have good access to the media, as they can simply gloss over the details yet cite these "facts" as "overwhelming evidence" while they are really just lies made to polarize and separate people from the truth. This tactic is also found where one side of an "argument" has more money/resources/interest than they other, and so this rich "side" of the "argument" simply pays for or fabricates a bunch of arbitrary studies and buries the less fortunate side with more "evidence" than is possible for so few people to review and refute.
It's quite a genius strategy because it's hard to filter without seeming naive or single-minded. My general rule which seems to work well is that if someone cannot communicate a thesis in 400 words or less, they either don't know what they're talking about or they aren't very good at communicating the concept. Either way, the parent poster's argument fits as a long and complex argument built upon false assumptions and incorrect definitions. The foundation has been built for him/her via special interest groups with the aforementioned "resources" to spam the discussions and poison these so-called debates with armies of straw men for what should have originally been a non-issue. No wonder nobody bothers to refute these sources, they're illegitimate to begin with and do nothing but waste people's time, so why bother.
The parent uses two websites as primary sources which are Answers in Genesis and Institute for Creation Research. It is worth noting that none of this evidence has been published in a peer-reviewed journal and no information is available for auditing the cash flow for the websites, so naturally the content is largely produced by a few prolific authors of questionable moral and intellectual decency. The tone of the articles is polarizing and never avoids reinforcing the "us vs them" image via the usual straw man attack that supposes creationists are a legitimate group of individuals who have a legitimate alternative to what the "evolutionists" "believe".
I would like to take this opportunity to suggest that "evolutionists" or whatever you want to call them, don't "believe" in evolution. They observe it in nature and it so far best explains the natural progression of life from its origins until the present, and from the present until the end of life. And until anyone observes a repeatable phenomena that evolution cannot explain (that it ought to) and some other theory does, then evolution is the prevailing theory in the field.
It's easy to give in to the polarity and believe that it's us versus them. These sites and other such sources of misinformation with such strong politically divisive rhetoric ought to be ignored. They promote dishonest discussion where people need not think for themselves but rely on others to think for them and they play to our emotions by inciting us to anger so we no longer need to be rational. Not only that, but they serve as a distraction from more important issues, such as the general political shortcomings of the day (e.g. our foreign policy. Iraq. etc) and even the issue that originally brought up this whole mess in the first place: EDUCATION. Who cares about education in the US when we can talk about abortion or how fundamentalist Christians are forcing Christianity down the throats of a nation with the freedom of religion? Who cares that the US was founded by agnostics, deists, and the like (but not Christians)? Minor details lost in a sea of deception. It really does feel like the Matrix when people are so capable of willing arbitrary concepts to be truth. The red pill for those who question everything and the blue pill for those who are less s
Exactly. Ignoring MS because they're not that interesting is the way to go. Actively hating on them all the time just wastes energy. Do something cool like... write a kernel that does stuff well... and not bemoan MS at the lack of doing anything else productive. At least, that's what I came away with.
I think, that's ultimately what Microsoft is trying to do. It makes no sense to do what they've done to DirectX 10 except when you view it in the light of the Xbox console. They are killing PC gaming.
Lying is essential when a rational being is forced to interact within an irrational structure. In other words, most people don't really want to know anything. They just want you to say something. I'm not saying people can't handle the truth and then further saying they don't have a right to it, but when someone time and again shows their inability to handle reality I simply stop giving them the reality... I can't force anyone to leave their foundation of understanding in order to understand what I say or see, so why bother them and everyone else with that?
So, intuitively, I agree with the premise that lying provides the glue of our social framework. Otherwise, if nobody lied it'd be a pretty boring world.
It sounds like a hack, not a solution. We're talking about headings here, not tables. TeX is very straightforward about formatting. In TeX, to make text flush with your margins is like saying exactly that, make the text flush with the margins. To make Word do this you need to add a non-intuitive object reminiscent of HTML in order to get the formatting you want. Word is a nice tool for people who're uninterested in knowing the internals of formating. However, I've never thought that mixing formatting and writing would result in anything but poorer writing. It's hard enough to write well as it is, let alone when you're worried about making it look right at the same time. I'm ranting Knuthisms, sorry. Cheers.
Slashdot Mirror
Breaking the law and getting caught is not everything a jury must consider. Please see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
So people have problems with computers. At least when they have the problem with Linux or MacOS they learn about their computer and not some black magic MS-centric IT knowledge that's changed every 3 years for no apparent reason. I agree the technical hurdles are a problem, but not as big as you might imagine.
I don't see any original work or links to peer reviewed science, just some shoddy amazon link to a book that the article was apparently summarizing.
The Hudson Institute is not a scientific entity and has no authority whatsoever on this topic. It is an old school right wing think tank, which apparently means they're incapable of understanding anyway. Try linking me to these supposed Nature or Science articles that they allude to in the article. My bet is that he used slight of tongue and there are no such articles refuting the IPCC's findings but perhaps scientific discussions on improving the models.
The author of this book, Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Dennis Avery, is apparently a sellout just like the rest of the "scientists" that claim the IPCC is largely incorrect. Sure, the IPCC may have gotten a few things a little bit off, but for the most part their view is current in climate science.
So I take it that your position is to do nothing, let some lazy ass rich people just go about business like nothing is wrong and Everything is Okay, shit happens, who cares? Who cares what the entire field of climate science agrees on, I'd rather listen to Michael Crichton and FOX News when it comes to Global Warming.
Sheesh... I am less surprised by this viewpoint every time I hear it. The vast marketing budgets make sense because if you can control what people think or feel, that's worth all the money you can afford to spend as a business. Welcome to consumer America where we have belief systems galore, available in all shapes an sizes. You bought the wrong one. Take it back.
# Most of (>50% of) the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely (confidence level >90%) due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations.
# The probability that this is caused by natural climatic processes alone is less than 5%.
# Both past and future anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions will continue to contribute to warming and sea level rise for more than a millennium.
# Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values over the past 650,000 years Now can we get on to solving the problem already? We've wasted more man-hours tilling over conservative think tank bullshit than it'd have taken to deal with this.
So back to the point I was making earlier, yes indeed, it shall cost industry money in order to scrub greenhouse gases. That's not to say they can't profit or at least salvage some value from the results. According to Dr. Hans Ziock at Los Alamos National Labs it'd cost about $0.25 per gallon of gasoline to capture the CO2. I'm sure some ridiculously low percentage taken from any modern day CEO's salary is more than enough to fund such responsible business practices. A hamper on the economy? Please... we have bigger fish to fry in that arena, too, but nobody seems to notice those either (hedge fund rape or "good" business is diametrically opposed to innovation). Funny how that works out so we end up discussing "the issues" while it does nothing for anyone except cause a stalemate, which in turn allows rich people get richer in the usual ways and everything else to stay the same or get worse. Welcome to Capitalism: where the dollar is God.
Link to transcript please?
Informative? What is this site? A joke?
Not quite. Waste is waste, and eliminating waste is the key to any process whether it be manufacturing or R&D. The technology is available to do this and becomes extremely viable on the mass production side of things. Imagine this: CO2 scrubbers in all the stacks, which recover the CO2 thereby allowing the companies to sell it off to PraxAir and other gas distributors. One man's garbage is another man's treasure. The economic implications of reducing waste, are, well, good. Try again...
You've been reading too much Crichton. Your level of doubt for the climate scientists and their ability to discern correct information from data is unhealthy. If it is my job to correctly understand and read temperature throughout time and make predictive models, don't you think I'd have this doubt? Wouldn't I want to calibrate the temperatures to known standards? Oh wait, you're talking about thousands and thousands of data points all averaged out and you're worried about a few weather stations being off? You've chosen what to believe, but just understand that you've bought into a load of shit from a bunch of rich old asshats with nothing better to do than to destroy the world for the future children they never had.
I think this is an interesting situation that we're not really considering completely. The Church is not an entity that exists for the sake of capitalism, though has adapted to exist within such a system. To say that the Church is motivated to generate income, while true, does not explain why their need for money as implicitly as say, Enron. Will the Church do "evil" by sheltering their nest egg that allows them to exist within a capitalist world? Not quite... but does having a multi-billion dollar international corporate conglomerate avoiding US taxes but generating most of their income via the US is, generally speaking, unethical. So in the sense that the Pope is protecting the interests of his own, sure, he's definitely playing the international finances game for the benefit of the Catholic Church. He seems to be drawing a line for the multinational corporations in terms of ethics, which seems to be an unexplored topic.
Regardless of any perceived hypocrisy, it seems we might do better to focus on what the Pope is saying instead of killing the messenger. International corporateering is an issue, and will only become more of an issue in the future if nothing is done about it. There's no need for companies to sell to the US while existing within the US at all. The thought of all of the large US companies doing that ought to have a chilling effect on the back of your neck. We're basically getting raped and pillaged by our own beloved capitalism. Viva la mano invisible!
Heh, I think you got modded Troll for the PS3 comment. s/$600 PS3/Wii/ and you'd get at least 2 more points in Interesting/Informative.
Just like we don't see MOST of the stories submitted to /. there ought to be a better form of sifting through the comments. For the most part I enjoy having all comments available, it's just a pain in the ass when you actually want to see the discussion. So I say make smarter filters or better filters that allow you to put the SPAM back in the can, so to say.
I mean the original TeX, not LaTeX. I could never get used to the "n" pass processing that LaTeX does while Tex uses 1 pass. It also kind of bothered me that LaTeX adds no functionality to TeX... oh well, anyway, does anyone still use plain TeX?
After getting lazily deleted enough times, moderate the account. E.g. he posts, the post doesn't appear until it's seen as something not a waste of time.
Whoa, post spam! This has been posted already. Verbatim. Fits into my argument (above somewhere) that it's all just a pile of spam. Repeated posting is something spammers do. Oh, and FYI, if you actually believe it, don't post AC.
*yawn* And this post is a classic example of what's difficult in discussing Truth: use an inordinate volume of words to draw attention away from the issues at hand while simultaneously convincing the less scrupulous of us that the arguments hold true. This tactic is very useful for those who have good access to the media, as they can simply gloss over the details yet cite these "facts" as "overwhelming evidence" while they are really just lies made to polarize and separate people from the truth. This tactic is also found where one side of an "argument" has more money/resources/interest than they other, and so this rich "side" of the "argument" simply pays for or fabricates a bunch of arbitrary studies and buries the less fortunate side with more "evidence" than is possible for so few people to review and refute.
It's quite a genius strategy because it's hard to filter without seeming naive or single-minded. My general rule which seems to work well is that if someone cannot communicate a thesis in 400 words or less, they either don't know what they're talking about or they aren't very good at communicating the concept. Either way, the parent poster's argument fits as a long and complex argument built upon false assumptions and incorrect definitions. The foundation has been built for him/her via special interest groups with the aforementioned "resources" to spam the discussions and poison these so-called debates with armies of straw men for what should have originally been a non-issue. No wonder nobody bothers to refute these sources, they're illegitimate to begin with and do nothing but waste people's time, so why bother.
The parent uses two websites as primary sources which are Answers in Genesis and Institute for Creation Research. It is worth noting that none of this evidence has been published in a peer-reviewed journal and no information is available for auditing the cash flow for the websites, so naturally the content is largely produced by a few prolific authors of questionable moral and intellectual decency. The tone of the articles is polarizing and never avoids reinforcing the "us vs them" image via the usual straw man attack that supposes creationists are a legitimate group of individuals who have a legitimate alternative to what the "evolutionists" "believe".
I would like to take this opportunity to suggest that "evolutionists" or whatever you want to call them, don't "believe" in evolution. They observe it in nature and it so far best explains the natural progression of life from its origins until the present, and from the present until the end of life. And until anyone observes a repeatable phenomena that evolution cannot explain (that it ought to) and some other theory does, then evolution is the prevailing theory in the field.
It's easy to give in to the polarity and believe that it's us versus them. These sites and other such sources of misinformation with such strong politically divisive rhetoric ought to be ignored. They promote dishonest discussion where people need not think for themselves but rely on others to think for them and they play to our emotions by inciting us to anger so we no longer need to be rational. Not only that, but they serve as a distraction from more important issues, such as the general political shortcomings of the day (e.g. our foreign policy. Iraq. etc) and even the issue that originally brought up this whole mess in the first place: EDUCATION. Who cares about education in the US when we can talk about abortion or how fundamentalist Christians are forcing Christianity down the throats of a nation with the freedom of religion? Who cares that the US was founded by agnostics, deists, and the like (but not Christians)? Minor details lost in a sea of deception. It really does feel like the Matrix when people are so capable of willing arbitrary concepts to be truth. The red pill for those who question everything and the blue pill for those who are less s
What FUD, exactly? I'm curious...
Exactly. Ignoring MS because they're not that interesting is the way to go. Actively hating on them all the time just wastes energy. Do something cool like... write a kernel that does stuff well... and not bemoan MS at the lack of doing anything else productive. At least, that's what I came away with.
With how many game development talent that they've bought for the Xbox, I think they are forcing the hand.
I think, that's ultimately what Microsoft is trying to do. It makes no sense to do what they've done to DirectX 10 except when you view it in the light of the Xbox console. They are killing PC gaming.
Lying is essential when a rational being is forced to interact within an irrational structure. In other words, most people don't really want to know anything. They just want you to say something. I'm not saying people can't handle the truth and then further saying they don't have a right to it, but when someone time and again shows their inability to handle reality I simply stop giving them the reality... I can't force anyone to leave their foundation of understanding in order to understand what I say or see, so why bother them and everyone else with that?
So, intuitively, I agree with the premise that lying provides the glue of our social framework. Otherwise, if nobody lied it'd be a pretty boring world.
Wow, I really didn't expect that. Props to you, Surt.
Pure "genious" I say!
It sounds like a hack, not a solution. We're talking about headings here, not tables. TeX is very straightforward about formatting. In TeX, to make text flush with your margins is like saying exactly that, make the text flush with the margins. To make Word do this you need to add a non-intuitive object reminiscent of HTML in order to get the formatting you want. Word is a nice tool for people who're uninterested in knowing the internals of formating. However, I've never thought that mixing formatting and writing
would result in anything but poorer writing. It's hard enough to write well as it is, let alone when you're worried about making it look right at the same time. I'm ranting Knuthisms, sorry. Cheers.