Because according to the cult of global warming, you have no privacy. They're doing this for *your* best interest.
I find the psychology interesting here. Companies have tracked spending on corporate credit cards since forever; after all, it's their money you're spending, not yours, and they don't want you to spend it on booze and hookers. I don't remember ever hearing anyone complain about the principle of this. But as soon as Mastercard start to offer carbon emissions analysis to their corporate customers -- because 80% of those customers wanted it -- we have a dozen outraged comments about "invasion of privacy" and "the cult of global warming".
Just try this: storm into the accounts dept. and tell them you're not going to submit receipts for travel reimbursement, because it's none of their damned business whether you rented a hummer or took the train, and if they say otherwise they're members of the cult of global warming. Maybe you could get the ACLU to take on your case.
While I would dearly love to have Al Gore's data from this enterprise, I'm not so sanguine about him having mine.
As I'm sure you noticed from R'ingTFA, this programme basically involves some extra annotation on a system Mastercard's been running since 2002 allowing corporate clients to analyse spending on their cards. So yes, if you're working for Al Gore and spending his money on your company card, he will (shock horror) be entitled to data-mine your transactions for anything he damn well pleases. Get over it: you don't have any expectation of privacy when you're spending company money on company business.
Why do Japanese students tend to do so much better then american students, simple they compete in mental subjects, the grades are posted on a giant board for everyone to see, and are ranked from smartest to dumbest. In america grades are confidential, we can't risk students self esteem getting hurt when they are made fun of for being dumb
That's one way to do it. But Finland gets even better results using an absolute minimum of grading, streaming, ranking, testing, and public shaming of the "dumbest" -- with far fewer hours spent in school or private tuition to boot. And I dare say it results in happier, less stressed kids too. Of course I'm not saying that just throwing out the grading is sufficient to improve standards -- the linked article has a little more detail on the other important factors (well-trained, well-paid, respected teachers, for a start).
The graph which you linked to on Wikipedia contradicts your claim that
it's now warmer than at any time in the past 12,000 years
and in fact, supports what I said. Did you mean to include a different link, or am I missing something?
Just to be clear we're talking about the same graph, this is the one I believe you're referring to. There's a thick black line showing the past temperature, which at no point goes above ~0.3. There is also an arrow, labelled "2004", showing the global average temperature in 2004, which is pointing at ~0.45. 0.45 is greater than 0.3. The inset graph, showing the last 2000 years, is reproduced in larger form in the other link I supplied, and shows clearly that 2004 is not an anomaly but part of a steep upward trend, and also shows it as warmer than any time in the past 2000 years.
Rather than trusting a political organization or whoever wrote that in Wikipedia, I prefer to look at the data myself.
The graph was prepared by Robert A. Rohde, as the page clearly states; the dozen data sources used are fully referenced, and the criteria for their selection are stated. I'm not sure how that makes it intrinsically less reliable than Willis Eschenbach's personal interpretation of some speleothem data, but let's continue nevertheless.
Rather than trusting a political organization or whoever wrote that in Wikipedia, I prefer to look at the data myself. A zip file containing speleotherm data has thoughtfully been provided here:
When I click the link to the zip file I get a 403 Forbidden. Never mind, let's pass to Eschenbach's graph, since in any case you don't mention what conclusions you yourself drew from looking at the data. As you say, the graph does look very convincing, because Eschenbach has directly equated delta18O values with temperature -- not done in the Nature paper he cites, for the simple reason that delta18O is not solely dependent on temperature (if it were, palaeoclimatology would be a lot easier).
Entertainingly, the very source that Eschenbach links to in support of his conversion factor states clearly: "Because [delta]18O may be modified by temporal changes in the oceanic moisture source and/or storm track trajectories, it is not possible to calculate temperature changes precisely (15). On the basis of present-day spatial [delta]18O-temperature relations, the magnitude of [delta]18O variability around the mean is probably too large to ascribe to changes in air temperature alone." (my emphasis)
So, 200-odd words into Eschenbach's "investigation", his entire methodology has been invalidated by one of his own references. This, presumably, is why he chose to publish his work on "wattsupwiththat" rather than in a scientific journal.
More significantly, the rate of temperature increase is large, and is not decreasing; on the 12,000-year graph, the past fifty years are almost a vertical line. So even if you were correct in asserting that we're just returning to the Medieval Warm Period, we're clearly going to overshoot it pretty swiftly.
The Earth has been cooling since about the time of Christ.
No, there have been various fluctuations which are all dwarfed by both the current temperature and current rate of warming.
Considering how well humanity did in warmer times than this, a finer grained assessment of the risk vs. rewards should be made
Fortunately this has been done; it's called the Working Group II Report of the IPCC Fourth Assessment. Their conclusions don't support the assertion that the temperature increases will be a net benefit for humanity.
what's with the crap about polar bears becoming extinct?
Concerns about polar bear populations are due to an observed decline in the number of polar bears in most of the monitored populations. This is based on people going out and counting polar bears, not arguing about whether the populations should be declining based on what they believe about global temperature trends.
Two things about the Don Easterbrook post you link to:
1. The GISP2 data-set -- which his post is (loosely) based on -- ends in 1905, so no wonder that the recent warming trend doesn't show up! A hockey stick doesn't look like a hockey stick if you chop the end off.
2. Easterbrook claims his data is "Modified from Cuffy and Clow, 1997" (he's misspelled the first author's name, but never mind). So, why is he modifying it? And how? He doesn't say. Since he has a track record of tampering with the data to support his claims, that's a bit worrying.
You wrote that "the whole United States and Russia are also having exceptionally cold winters". That could reasonably be construed as a "claim".
It's just the grandparent was disingenuous to claim that Britain was the only place in the world experiencing a cold winter...
I did not claim that. The summary cherry-picked this year's British winter as evidence of global cooling, which I criticized. Nowhere did I say that Britain is the "only place in the world experiencing a cold winter", since that would have been a falsehood.
... when it is the whole of Europe, Russia, and most of the United States at least.
Well, the map that I linked to in my original post contradicts that claim. It appears that November was cold in Britain, Scandinavia, and the north-western contiguous United States, and warm pretty much everywhere else (especially Russia).
Unfortunately I can't respond more specifically to your assertion since you haven't provided any data or citations to back it up.
Both would help a lot by averaging together a fixed set of years around the current one to smooth the data. As these graphs are presented the noise makes it possible for anybody to make all kinds of wild arguments both for and against global warming since there are exceptional hot and cold spots.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but the second map I linked to is indeed a multi-year (2000-2010) average, for exactly the reason you state. A 1990-2010 average shows a similar warming pattern.
1951-1980 is the "standard" GISS base period used in all their publications. I don't have a reference handy for the selection criteria, but would guess that before 1951 the data gets a lot more sparse. And since a lot of current work focuses on changes in recent (last ~30 years) climate, you can't go too far beyond 1980 without having your base period overlap with the time-span under investigation. The latter consideration, of course, doesn't really apply if we're just looking at November 2010; I just used it because it was the default.
Turns out it doesn't make much difference, though: using a base period of 1881-2009, the November anomaly looks much the same. And using a base period of 1881-1999 (to avoid overlapping with the last decade), the average annual anomaly for 2000-2010 looks like this -- again, very similar.
With Britain currently experiencing the coldest winter in over 300 years, and no new sunspots for the last week, are we heading for a Dalton Minimum
Why yes, it makes perfect sense to conclude things about decadal-scale global climate trends based on a month's data from 0.05% of the Earth's surface area!
For a global view of the temperature anomaly (vs. a 1951-1980 base period), see this GISS surface temperature analysis (that's for November; December data not available yet). So yes, there's a -1 deg C anomaly in Britain, counterbalanced by huge +4 to +10 deg C anomalies across northern Asia and the Arctic.
For a look at the longer-term trends, try this map of annual average temperatures for the past ten years vs. the same base period. Guess what? It's getting warmer, despite declining solar activity.
I dislike the doom-laden 'climate change will wreck our environment' crowd for one key reason: they can't provide any evidence that I wouldn't prefer the climate after it has changed.
And neither can I, since I don't know your personal situation, or the climate forecasts for where you live. As to the idea that major global warming would be anything other than disastrous for most of humanity, the 976-page second chapter of the IPCC 4th assessment report deals with it fairly comprehensively. You might want to consider that, even if the weather becomes more to your liking in your particular location, you are tied to the global economy and will feel the impact of adaptation costs in other regions, in the form of things like higher prices for goods and higher taxes. Unless of course you're living a self-sufficient off-grid lifestyle, in which case congratulations, you're probably part of the solution!
For one, a lot of very wealthy people are going to lose their expensive beach front properties.... and a huge number of poor people are going to lose everything, including their lives. Unsurprisingly, the rich tend to weather natural disasters much better than the poor.
A lot of poor people, mostly in third world countries will have to move.
You toss this out as though it's trivial. Where are you going to put 17 million displaced Bangladeshis, when their neighbours are dealing with their own internal refugee crises from the same climate and sea-level changes?
But most people will not starve to death, we will adapt.
Most people in the developed world will not starve to death. The outlook for the rest is not so good, considering that over 30 million people a year already die of starvation. As you say, doing nothing is still an option. But we should at least be up-front about the consequences.
The AGW believers want to use governments to force people to lead objectively poorer lives. Many of them have wanted this since before Global Warming was even theorized.
And the great thing about the leaked CRU emails is that you should now be able to provide evidence for this otherwise unbelievable claim! Surely, from that enormous heap, you will be able to pull out many internal communications along the lines of "our evil plan to make people lead poorer lives is advancing apace".
So, er, go on then. Where's the evidence? Come on, you've got a goldmine of source material now from those conspirators: I'm sure you can find something more damning than a tenuous, out-of-context usage of the word "trick" in a discussion about combining tree-ring datasets. If these people have a hidden agenda, presumably they've alluded to it at some point in all those internal emails.
Amen. One of my university lecturers (in a heavily mathematical course) employed the technique of lecturing from pre-written OHP foils, which he would reveal one line at a time, at a speed which kept us all scribbling madly for the whole hour without any neurons left over to follow the mathematical reasoning -- after which I'd have to go home and write the whole lot out again, before I forgot what the barely recognizable scrawls meant. After two or three weeks of this, several of us approached him to ask that he provide us with photocopies beforehand, since he already had the material written out. He refused point blank; we quit.
I actually enjoy taking pen-and-paper notes for lectures with a lower information density; condensing the material forces me to process it. But a page of equations is already as condensed as it gets.
>> Ernest Rutherford once said The only possible conclusion the social sciences can draw is: some do, some don't
> Must be nice to get that level of certainty. My thesis (cell biology) so far is at "Some do."
Rutherford was not exactly known for his humility; much like the post you replied to, he had a general attitude of "the things I do are difficult and important; the things you do are trivial" (though I don't dispute the first half). He made no effort to disguise his contempt for, well, pretty much anything that wasn't particle physics.
Then again, when I saw one suggesting I could own my own Bionic Turtle (I kid you not), spam did rise *a little bit* in my opinion. I still deleted it, but I loved that title.
My favourite spam offer ever: 75,000 live chickens, delivered to an airport of my choice. Yes, really.
You're selling Dr Mörner short! He's an expert in dowsing as well as an expert on geophysics, and he applies the same rigorous levels of scientific proof to demonstrating his dowsing skills as he does to arguing against sea-level rise.
To force the free distribution of source code, the GPL requires publishers to place the source code on the disk they distribute their applications on
False; they simply have to make it available.
Under GPL, "you've got to give it away for free, and you've got to give the source code away for free as well," says analyst Kiewe.
False; RMS himself used to charge $150 for tapes of the GNU system. The GPL FAQ specifically states that you may charge for software under the terms of the GPL. Here's a current example of GPL software being sold for money.
So in short: either they didn't do their homework, or they're deliberately spreading FUD.
That's exactly what I thought when I saw this. For my first couple of weeks of motorbike riding, I would usually arrive at my destination horribly sweaty, from a combination of physical effort, mental effort, and fear of imminent death. Well worth it for the joy and exhilaration, of course:-).
Paul Graham spouting off about something he doesn't have a clue about? Say it ain't so!
Yes they kept files on threats and non threats, who wants to have each team investigate the same harmless nuts?
Indeed: for too long has it ben assumed that the police only need to keep files on people who constitute threats. There's no harm in their compiling and disseminating dossiers on the innocent as well -- after all, those of us who aren't doing anything wrong have nothing to hide.
when the convention hit they knew which ones were the small hardcore fringe most likely to commit crimes and they culled em out of the herd while allowing several hundred thousand (misguided fools
It sounds like a very sensible efficiency measure to me: arrest people before they have committed a crime and save time all round. I for one applaud the work of the NYPD's new Precrime Analytical Wing!
> I seem to remember a game like this on the PC. Really fun.
I think you are thinking of Porrasturvat, a.k.a. Stair Dismount, a classic "ragdoll physics" simulation game where you push someone down a flight of stairs. Now available for Mac and Linux. There's also an even more painful-looking truck-themed sequel.
Slashdot Mirror
Because according to the cult of global warming, you have no privacy. They're doing this for *your* best interest.
I find the psychology interesting here. Companies have tracked spending on corporate credit cards since forever; after all, it's their money you're spending, not yours, and they don't want you to spend it on booze and hookers. I don't remember ever hearing anyone complain about the principle of this. But as soon as Mastercard start to offer carbon emissions analysis to their corporate customers -- because 80% of those customers wanted it -- we have a dozen outraged comments about "invasion of privacy" and "the cult of global warming".
Just try this: storm into the accounts dept. and tell them you're not going to submit receipts for travel reimbursement, because it's none of their damned business whether you rented a hummer or took the train, and if they say otherwise they're members of the cult of global warming. Maybe you could get the ACLU to take on your case.
While I would dearly love to have Al Gore's data from this enterprise, I'm not so sanguine about him having mine.
As I'm sure you noticed from R'ingTFA, this programme basically involves some extra annotation on a system Mastercard's been running since 2002 allowing corporate clients to analyse spending on their cards. So yes, if you're working for Al Gore and spending his money on your company card, he will (shock horror) be entitled to data-mine your transactions for anything he damn well pleases. Get over it: you don't have any expectation of privacy when you're spending company money on company business.
Why do Japanese students tend to do so much better then american students, simple they compete in mental subjects, the grades are posted on a giant board for everyone to see, and are ranked from smartest to dumbest. In america grades are confidential, we can't risk students self esteem getting hurt when they are made fun of for being dumb
That's one way to do it. But Finland gets even better results using an absolute minimum of grading, streaming, ranking, testing, and public shaming of the "dumbest" -- with far fewer hours spent in school or private tuition to boot. And I dare say it results in happier, less stressed kids too. Of course I'm not saying that just throwing out the grading is sufficient to improve standards -- the linked article has a little more detail on the other important factors (well-trained, well-paid, respected teachers, for a start).
The graph which you linked to on Wikipedia contradicts your claim that
it's now warmer than at any time in the past 12,000 years
and in fact, supports what I said. Did you mean to include a different link, or am I missing something?
Just to be clear we're talking about the same graph, this is the one I believe you're referring to. There's a thick black line showing the past temperature, which at no point goes above ~0.3. There is also an arrow, labelled "2004", showing the global average temperature in 2004, which is pointing at ~0.45. 0.45 is greater than 0.3. The inset graph, showing the last 2000 years, is reproduced in larger form in the other link I supplied, and shows clearly that 2004 is not an anomaly but part of a steep upward trend, and also shows it as warmer than any time in the past 2000 years.
Rather than trusting a political organization or whoever wrote that in Wikipedia, I prefer to look at the data myself.
The graph was prepared by Robert A. Rohde, as the page clearly states; the dozen data sources used are fully referenced, and the criteria for their selection are stated. I'm not sure how that makes it intrinsically less reliable than Willis Eschenbach's personal interpretation of some speleothem data, but let's continue nevertheless.
Rather than trusting a political organization or whoever wrote that in Wikipedia, I prefer to look at the data myself. A zip file containing speleotherm data has thoughtfully been provided here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/26/in-which-i-go-spelunking/ [wattsupwiththat.com]
When I click the link to the zip file I get a 403 Forbidden. Never mind, let's pass to Eschenbach's graph, since in any case you don't mention what conclusions you yourself drew from looking at the data. As you say, the graph does look very convincing, because Eschenbach has directly equated delta18O values with temperature -- not done in the Nature paper he cites, for the simple reason that delta18O is not solely dependent on temperature (if it were, palaeoclimatology would be a lot easier).
Entertainingly, the very source that Eschenbach links to in support of his conversion factor states clearly: "Because [delta]18O may be modified by temporal changes in the oceanic moisture source and/or storm track trajectories, it is not possible to calculate temperature changes precisely (15). On the basis of present-day spatial [delta]18O-temperature relations, the magnitude of [delta]18O variability around the mean is probably too large to ascribe to changes in air temperature alone." (my emphasis)
So, 200-odd words into Eschenbach's "investigation", his entire methodology has been invalidated by one of his own references. This, presumably, is why he chose to publish his work on "wattsupwiththat" rather than in a scientific journal.
our current temperature is almost back up to what it was 1000 years ago, but not yet back to what it was 5000 years ago.
You fail to cite a source for this (as I mentioned, the post you linked conveniently ignores the last century). In fact it's now warmer than at any time in the past 12,000 years.
More significantly, the rate of temperature increase is large, and is not decreasing; on the 12,000-year graph, the past fifty years are almost a vertical line. So even if you were correct in asserting that we're just returning to the Medieval Warm Period, we're clearly going to overshoot it pretty swiftly.
The Earth has been cooling since about the time of Christ.
No, there have been various fluctuations which are all dwarfed by both the current temperature and current rate of warming.
Considering how well humanity did in warmer times than this, a finer grained assessment of the risk vs. rewards should be made
Fortunately this has been done; it's called the Working Group II Report of the IPCC Fourth Assessment. Their conclusions don't support the assertion that the temperature increases will be a net benefit for humanity.
what's with the crap about polar bears becoming extinct?
Concerns about polar bear populations are due to an observed decline in the number of polar bears in most of the monitored populations. This is based on people going out and counting polar bears, not arguing about whether the populations should be declining based on what they believe about global temperature trends.
Two things about the Don Easterbrook post you link to:
1. The GISP2 data-set -- which his post is (loosely) based on -- ends in 1905, so no wonder that the recent warming trend doesn't show up! A hockey stick doesn't look like a hockey stick if you chop the end off.
2. Easterbrook claims his data is "Modified from Cuffy and Clow, 1997" (he's misspelled the first author's name, but never mind). So, why is he modifying it? And how? He doesn't say. Since he has a track record of tampering with the data to support his claims, that's a bit worrying.
I wasn't making any claims.
You wrote that "the whole United States and Russia are also having exceptionally cold winters". That could reasonably be construed as a "claim".
It's just the grandparent was disingenuous to claim that Britain was the only place in the world experiencing a cold winter...
I did not claim that. The summary cherry-picked this year's British winter as evidence of global cooling, which I criticized. Nowhere did I say that Britain is the "only place in the world experiencing a cold winter", since that would have been a falsehood.
... when it is the whole of Europe, Russia, and most of the United States at least.
Well, the map that I linked to in my original post contradicts that claim. It appears that November was cold in Britain, Scandinavia, and the north-western contiguous United States, and warm pretty much everywhere else (especially Russia).
Unfortunately I can't respond more specifically to your assertion since you haven't provided any data or citations to back it up.
Here's MY claim: global warming stopped in 2000.
I wish that you were correct; unfortunately the data does not support your claim.
Both would help a lot by averaging together a fixed set of years around the current one to smooth the data. As these graphs are presented the noise makes it possible for anybody to make all kinds of wild arguments both for and against global warming since there are exceptional hot and cold spots.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but the second map I linked to is indeed a multi-year (2000-2010) average, for exactly the reason you state. A 1990-2010 average shows a similar warming pattern.
Why is 1951 - 1980 used as a base period?
Why not 1880 - 2009 ?
1951-1980 is the "standard" GISS base period used in all their publications. I don't have a reference handy for the selection criteria, but would guess that before 1951 the data gets a lot more sparse. And since a lot of current work focuses on changes in recent (last ~30 years) climate, you can't go too far beyond 1980 without having your base period overlap with the time-span under investigation. The latter consideration, of course, doesn't really apply if we're just looking at November 2010; I just used it because it was the default.
Turns out it doesn't make much difference, though: using a base period of 1881-2009, the November anomaly looks much the same. And using a base period of 1881-1999 (to avoid overlapping with the last decade), the average annual anomaly for 2000-2010 looks like this -- again, very similar.
With Britain currently experiencing the coldest winter in over 300 years, and no new sunspots for the last week, are we heading for a Dalton Minimum
Why yes, it makes perfect sense to conclude things about decadal-scale global climate trends based on a month's data from 0.05% of the Earth's surface area!
For a global view of the temperature anomaly (vs. a 1951-1980 base period), see this GISS surface temperature analysis (that's for November; December data not available yet). So yes, there's a -1 deg C anomaly in Britain, counterbalanced by huge +4 to +10 deg C anomalies across northern Asia and the Arctic.
For a look at the longer-term trends, try this map of annual average temperatures for the past ten years vs. the same base period. Guess what? It's getting warmer, despite declining solar activity.
The GISS map generator is a great tool for exploring these variations.
I dislike the doom-laden 'climate change will wreck our environment' crowd for one key reason: they can't provide any evidence that I wouldn't prefer the climate after it has changed.
And neither can I, since I don't know your personal situation, or the climate forecasts for where you live. As to the idea that major global warming would be anything other than disastrous for most of humanity, the 976-page second chapter of the IPCC 4th assessment report deals with it fairly comprehensively. You might want to consider that, even if the weather becomes more to your liking in your particular location, you are tied to the global economy and will feel the impact of adaptation costs in other regions, in the form of things like higher prices for goods and higher taxes. Unless of course you're living a self-sufficient off-grid lifestyle, in which case congratulations, you're probably part of the solution!
For one, a lot of very wealthy people are going to lose their expensive beach front properties. ... and a huge number of poor people are going to lose everything, including their lives. Unsurprisingly, the rich tend to weather natural disasters much better than the poor.
A lot of poor people, mostly in third world countries will have to move.
You toss this out as though it's trivial. Where are you going to put 17 million displaced Bangladeshis, when their neighbours are dealing with their own internal refugee crises from the same climate and sea-level changes?
But most people will not starve to death, we will adapt.
Most people in the developed world will not starve to death. The outlook for the rest is not so good, considering that over 30 million people a year already die of starvation. As you say, doing nothing is still an option. But we should at least be up-front about the consequences.
The AGW believers want to use governments to force people to lead objectively poorer lives. Many of them have wanted this since before Global Warming was even theorized.
And the great thing about the leaked CRU emails is that you should now be able to provide evidence for this otherwise unbelievable claim! Surely, from that enormous heap, you will be able to pull out many internal communications along the lines of "our evil plan to make people lead poorer lives is advancing apace".
So, er, go on then. Where's the evidence? Come on, you've got a goldmine of source material now from those conspirators: I'm sure you can find something more damning than a tenuous, out-of-context usage of the word "trick" in a discussion about combining tree-ring datasets. If these people have a hidden agenda, presumably they've alluded to it at some point in all those internal emails.
Stepping on the pins will not kill you.
Not quite true. Stepping on the pins will not kill you, unless you go to a homeopath for treatment rather than a doctor. Yay natural healing!
Take a look at the Freehand Formula Entry System (GPL). Handwriting recognition for mathematics.
Amen. One of my university lecturers (in a heavily mathematical course) employed the technique of lecturing from pre-written OHP foils, which he would reveal one line at a time, at a speed which kept us all scribbling madly for the whole hour without any neurons left over to follow the mathematical reasoning -- after which I'd have to go home and write the whole lot out again, before I forgot what the barely recognizable scrawls meant. After two or three weeks of this, several of us approached him to ask that he provide us with photocopies beforehand, since he already had the material written out. He refused point blank; we quit.
I actually enjoy taking pen-and-paper notes for lectures with a lower information density; condensing the material forces me to process it. But a page of equations is already as condensed as it gets.
>> Ernest Rutherford once said The only possible conclusion the social sciences can draw is: some do, some don't
> Must be nice to get that level of certainty. My thesis (cell biology) so far is at "Some do."
Rutherford was not exactly known for his humility; much like the post you replied to, he had a general attitude of "the things I do are difficult and important; the things you do are trivial" (though I don't dispute the first half). He made no effort to disguise his contempt for, well, pretty much anything that wasn't particle physics.
Then again, when I saw one suggesting I could own my own Bionic Turtle (I kid you not), spam did rise *a little bit* in my opinion. I still deleted it, but I loved that title.
My favourite spam offer ever: 75,000 live chickens, delivered to an airport of my choice. Yes, really.
You're selling Dr Mörner short! He's an expert in dowsing as well as an expert on geophysics, and he applies the same rigorous levels of scientific proof to demonstrating his dowsing skills as he does to arguing against sea-level rise.
This is ludicrous. Here I am, in the midst of a Slashdot thread on copyright law, and I find a post which is
1. cogently reasoned,
2. level-headed, and
3. written by an *actual lawyer*?
It's the end times, I swear.
From TFA:
To force the free distribution of source code, the GPL requires publishers to place the source code on the disk they distribute their applications on
False; they simply have to make it available.
Under GPL, "you've got to give it away for free, and you've got to give the source code away for free as well," says analyst Kiewe.
False; RMS himself used to charge $150 for tapes of the GNU system. The GPL FAQ specifically states that you may charge for software under the terms of the GPL. Here's a current example of GPL software being sold for money.
So in short: either they didn't do their homework, or they're deliberately spreading FUD.
That's exactly what I thought when I saw this. For my first couple of weeks of motorbike riding, I would usually arrive at my destination horribly sweaty, from a combination of physical effort, mental effort, and fear of imminent death. Well worth it for the joy and exhilaration, of course :-).
Paul Graham spouting off about something he doesn't have a clue about? Say it ain't so!
Yes they kept files on threats and non threats, who wants to have each team investigate the same harmless nuts?
Indeed: for too long has it ben assumed that the police only need to keep files on people who constitute threats. There's no harm in their compiling and disseminating dossiers on the innocent as well -- after all, those of us who aren't doing anything wrong have nothing to hide.
when the convention hit they knew which ones were the small hardcore fringe most likely to commit crimes and they culled em out of the herd while allowing several hundred thousand (misguided fools
It sounds like a very sensible efficiency measure to me: arrest people before they have committed a crime and save time all round. I for one applaud the work of the NYPD's new Precrime Analytical Wing!
>> Fall down a flight of stairs?
> I seem to remember a game like this on the PC. Really fun.
I think you are thinking of Porrasturvat, a.k.a. Stair Dismount, a classic "ragdoll physics" simulation game where you push someone down a flight of stairs. Now available for Mac and Linux. There's also an even more painful-looking truck-themed sequel.