Wow. I bet you think you're so very clever. You obviously know that "climate change" refers to AGW, and yet you decided you'd play a semantic trick. Boy, you sure got me! You must be the smartest of your friends.
That would be the equivalent of saying "it will rain at some point". It's not a prediction so much as an observation about the fact that it always rains again somewhere (or, in your example, economies always falter at some point).
But these aren't strawmen. People actually say these things. In this very thread, I responded to a comment that said that the scientists are only publishing stuff to get more grant money.
What are these magical alternative solutions? The only reason we started talking about the government is because the private sector already wasn't doing anything about it, still isn't doing anything about and doesn't look to be doing anything about it in the foreseeable future. If it weren't for massive government subsidies and other incentives and regulations, I doubt we'd see what green tech we do actually have. The free market simply does not care about what will happen in a hundred years, as you astutely point out. But somebody has to or we're fucked. Actually, we're starting to be fucked now, but the changes so far haven't been catastrophic thankfully.
Predicting where a projectile will go is on quite a different level from predicting the behavior of the atmosphere of a planet down to a level as small as a town several days in advance. Tell me, can ballistics predict where the projectile will be in a week?
Why waste your time worrying about the few scammers? It seems like you are just constructing for yourself a reason not to bother at all. If Al Gore is a scammer, then find someone else who isn't and support their work. What does it solve for you to rant and rave about a few loons?
Only climate scientists care about funding and it's clear it's all they care about, to the point that they don't even bother doing real science anymore. Everybody else in the world does things for the right reasons and never worries about funding or PR. And the "skeptics" are only in it to save humanity from the evil climate scientists. They have nothing to gain monetarily or in political capital. Straight from the goodness of their hearts. It's only those zany climate scientists we have to worry about, with their scheme to, uhh, take over the world by, uhh, convincing us to use clean energy sources and, uhh, their zeal to understand an interesting part of the planet. Yeah, those guys are pure evil moneygrubbers, I tell ya.
Let's do only pick this one particular time when the ice is still below normal, but not by the much, and pretend like there's absolutely nothing going on. That's a winning strategy!
Take a look at the two year trend. At no point has it ever been at normal, much less above it, and many times it's been significantly below normal for significant periods of time. The trend is unmistakable.
I'm not surprised that ice recovers in the winter when it's still quite cold. The Earth's tilt hasn't changed. The summer trends are unmistakable, though, and not be ignored.
It's Slashdot. Despite being a tech and science nerd gathering spot, there's a strange strain of climate change denialism here. Maybe it's because the non-denialists don't bother commenting on these stories any more, leaving the denialists to defecate all over the comment section.
Predicting sensible weather in the short term is quite different from predicting broad climate trends. And as it happens, short-term weather prediction is actually pretty good these days. Hurricane tracks, for example, have fairly low error rates these days, outside of some exceptional scenarios. In what other field besides astronomy do we have that level of predictive ability and accuracy? Can we predict the economy? Social trends? What Egypt will do in a year? No. But we can predict the weather, regularly, and do a pretty damn good job. So stop shitting on the one field that is actually able to predict the future with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
There's almost no vector for attacking these embedded and mobile devices. They have restricted use and restricted applications. The social engineering that allows Windows to be such a common target just won't work on special-purpose systems. You have to compare apples to apples: Linux desktop/server to Windows desktop/server. Regardless of the specific numbers, Windows doesn't have significantly more CVEs when compared to Linux, but it has a significantly larger install base on the kind of systems that are the easiest to attack because of the purpose of those systems and the users of those systems.
Microsoft had shit for security in the 90s, everybody knows it, it's not interesting to talk about. But it's 2013. Even Windows XP was NT-based, and there have been several versions of Windows since then, with improved security. There has been user education and better front-end software security (particularly with web-browsers). The Linux fanbois need to stop arguing against Windows 95.
That's not an argument. If you don't have data, then you don't have an argument. You can speculate all you want, but I could just as easily speculate that the private reports are that Linux is even worse. Who are you to tell me I'm wrong?
I should have included the link to the specific CVE lists I looked at, but you can Google for yourself. I compared Linux kernel to Windows XP. Windows XP may include things beyond the kernel, but Linux kernel certain doesn't.
I agree about the extra complexity of the security model, but it is consistent throughout the kernel (there is even permissions checking for kernel objects within the kernel) and the lower layers of userland. It would be nice if the UI presented a more consistent and easy-to-understand frontend, but the 9x legacy requirements prevented that. SELinux is probably a good bit more complicated than the NT model and has been bolted on to the side of Linux. But it did fail to be as useful for the same reasons, and also the fact that few apps have been written with SELinux in mind, so coming up with sane and usable policies has been difficult. In Windows, you have a bunch of apps that think it's okay to write to system directories, and Microsoft had to let them through (sigh).
Pass the hash is a big flaw, but it's not fundamental Windows security. It's for networking only. So one can't, for example, compare it to Unix file permissions. And Unix has no standard remote login system, with SSH being only a de-facto. SSH is pretty darn good, though not without a few exploits (http://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/120/SSH.html).
Which is why I compared Linux kernel CVEs to Windows XP CVEs (not including additional software). Windows XP may still include components outside the kernel, but the fact that it had a comparable number of total exploits, even including those extra pieces of software (which the Linux kernel does not include), is only a mark further in favor of Windows.
Yet another Linux fanboi who doesn't really know anything about security or security models assuming that the Unix model is ipso facto better. Sure, the Windows shell has promoted a culture of insecurity, but the underlying model is far more advanced than what traditional Unix has to offer. Linux still has plenty of security exploits, but they aren't often well publicized because of the heterogeneous nature of Linux distributions and the fact that these exploits generally affect a smaller number of people (because so few people use Linux in the same environments that Windows is used).
FWIW, in 2013, there have been 73 CVEs for Linux, 41 for Windows XP and 47 for Windows 7.
There's no value in VB.NET, though. It's not just that it's different from VB6, it's that it's not really that different from C#. You might as well just use the flagship language for CLR. Also, the CLR environment isn't quite the same as the VB6 environment and is intended to be a full platform for writing real programs, rather than a platform for RAD and one-off crap. Basically, VB.NET doesn't fill a niche that makes sense in the way that VB6 did. Personally, I'd rather they take the few good features that VB.NET has that C# doesn't, put them in C#, and then kill VB.NET. That's assuming they don't kill.NET first.
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Wow. I bet you think you're so very clever. You obviously know that "climate change" refers to AGW, and yet you decided you'd play a semantic trick. Boy, you sure got me! You must be the smartest of your friends.
That would be the equivalent of saying "it will rain at some point". It's not a prediction so much as an observation about the fact that it always rains again somewhere (or, in your example, economies always falter at some point).
I said: "If it weren't for massive government subsidies and other incentives and regulations..."
And even with those, it's still generally not profitable. Oil and other fossil fuels run the show.
Plus chaos theory. And despite that, we still do a good job.
But these aren't strawmen. People actually say these things. In this very thread, I responded to a comment that said that the scientists are only publishing stuff to get more grant money.
What are these magical alternative solutions? The only reason we started talking about the government is because the private sector already wasn't doing anything about it, still isn't doing anything about and doesn't look to be doing anything about it in the foreseeable future. If it weren't for massive government subsidies and other incentives and regulations, I doubt we'd see what green tech we do actually have. The free market simply does not care about what will happen in a hundred years, as you astutely point out. But somebody has to or we're fucked. Actually, we're starting to be fucked now, but the changes so far haven't been catastrophic thankfully.
Predicting where a projectile will go is on quite a different level from predicting the behavior of the atmosphere of a planet down to a level as small as a town several days in advance. Tell me, can ballistics predict where the projectile will be in a week?
Why waste your time worrying about the few scammers? It seems like you are just constructing for yourself a reason not to bother at all. If Al Gore is a scammer, then find someone else who isn't and support their work. What does it solve for you to rant and rave about a few loons?
I know. Isn't it sad?
That's kinda the point of my post. It's a weird juxtaposition of posters here.
That's slashdot for you. Climate change isn't real, but humans are a cancer that should be destroyed.
Only climate scientists care about funding and it's clear it's all they care about, to the point that they don't even bother doing real science anymore. Everybody else in the world does things for the right reasons and never worries about funding or PR. And the "skeptics" are only in it to save humanity from the evil climate scientists. They have nothing to gain monetarily or in political capital. Straight from the goodness of their hearts. It's only those zany climate scientists we have to worry about, with their scheme to, uhh, take over the world by, uhh, convincing us to use clean energy sources and, uhh, their zeal to understand an interesting part of the planet. Yeah, those guys are pure evil moneygrubbers, I tell ya.
Let's do only pick this one particular time when the ice is still below normal, but not by the much, and pretend like there's absolutely nothing going on. That's a winning strategy!
Take a look at the two year trend. At no point has it ever been at normal, much less above it, and many times it's been significantly below normal for significant periods of time. The trend is unmistakable.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.arctic.png
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png
I'm not surprised that ice recovers in the winter when it's still quite cold. The Earth's tilt hasn't changed. The summer trends are unmistakable, though, and not be ignored.
It's Slashdot. Despite being a tech and science nerd gathering spot, there's a strange strain of climate change denialism here. Maybe it's because the non-denialists don't bother commenting on these stories any more, leaving the denialists to defecate all over the comment section.
That's just because you don't understand it. I guess that makes it a subpar analogy, but by no means the worst.
Predicting sensible weather in the short term is quite different from predicting broad climate trends. And as it happens, short-term weather prediction is actually pretty good these days. Hurricane tracks, for example, have fairly low error rates these days, outside of some exceptional scenarios. In what other field besides astronomy do we have that level of predictive ability and accuracy? Can we predict the economy? Social trends? What Egypt will do in a year? No. But we can predict the weather, regularly, and do a pretty damn good job. So stop shitting on the one field that is actually able to predict the future with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
Use Google. Seriously. It's not hard.
http://www.cvedetails.com/
There's almost no vector for attacking these embedded and mobile devices. They have restricted use and restricted applications. The social engineering that allows Windows to be such a common target just won't work on special-purpose systems. You have to compare apples to apples: Linux desktop/server to Windows desktop/server. Regardless of the specific numbers, Windows doesn't have significantly more CVEs when compared to Linux, but it has a significantly larger install base on the kind of systems that are the easiest to attack because of the purpose of those systems and the users of those systems.
Microsoft had shit for security in the 90s, everybody knows it, it's not interesting to talk about. But it's 2013. Even Windows XP was NT-based, and there have been several versions of Windows since then, with improved security. There has been user education and better front-end software security (particularly with web-browsers). The Linux fanbois need to stop arguing against Windows 95.
That's not an argument. If you don't have data, then you don't have an argument. You can speculate all you want, but I could just as easily speculate that the private reports are that Linux is even worse. Who are you to tell me I'm wrong?
Actually, I just included the kernel: http://www.cvedetails.com/product/47/Linux-Linux-Kernel.html?vendor_id=33
I should have included the link to the specific CVE lists I looked at, but you can Google for yourself. I compared Linux kernel to Windows XP. Windows XP may include things beyond the kernel, but Linux kernel certain doesn't.
I agree about the extra complexity of the security model, but it is consistent throughout the kernel (there is even permissions checking for kernel objects within the kernel) and the lower layers of userland. It would be nice if the UI presented a more consistent and easy-to-understand frontend, but the 9x legacy requirements prevented that. SELinux is probably a good bit more complicated than the NT model and has been bolted on to the side of Linux. But it did fail to be as useful for the same reasons, and also the fact that few apps have been written with SELinux in mind, so coming up with sane and usable policies has been difficult. In Windows, you have a bunch of apps that think it's okay to write to system directories, and Microsoft had to let them through (sigh).
Pass the hash is a big flaw, but it's not fundamental Windows security. It's for networking only. So one can't, for example, compare it to Unix file permissions. And Unix has no standard remote login system, with SSH being only a de-facto. SSH is pretty darn good, though not without a few exploits (http://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/120/SSH.html).
Which is why I compared Linux kernel CVEs to Windows XP CVEs (not including additional software). Windows XP may still include components outside the kernel, but the fact that it had a comparable number of total exploits, even including those extra pieces of software (which the Linux kernel does not include), is only a mark further in favor of Windows.
lol
Yet another Linux fanboi who doesn't really know anything about security or security models assuming that the Unix model is ipso facto better. Sure, the Windows shell has promoted a culture of insecurity, but the underlying model is far more advanced than what traditional Unix has to offer. Linux still has plenty of security exploits, but they aren't often well publicized because of the heterogeneous nature of Linux distributions and the fact that these exploits generally affect a smaller number of people (because so few people use Linux in the same environments that Windows is used).
FWIW, in 2013, there have been 73 CVEs for Linux, 41 for Windows XP and 47 for Windows 7.
There's no value in VB.NET, though. It's not just that it's different from VB6, it's that it's not really that different from C#. You might as well just use the flagship language for CLR. Also, the CLR environment isn't quite the same as the VB6 environment and is intended to be a full platform for writing real programs, rather than a platform for RAD and one-off crap. Basically, VB.NET doesn't fill a niche that makes sense in the way that VB6 did. Personally, I'd rather they take the few good features that VB.NET has that C# doesn't, put them in C#, and then kill VB.NET. That's assuming they don't kill .NET first.
As of this article, that's exactly what's happened.