I have had an essay peculating away in my brain for a while whose subject is the selective reading and quotation of various holy books.
The bible, for example, is full of all sorts of horrible things, but there are passages that contain "just", "lawful", "good", or "moral" stories and instructions - for simplicities' sake, let's call them the "bad" parts and the "good" parts.
Those who hold up any particular religious philosophy as the paragon of human virtue quote the "good" parts and ignore the "bad" parts.
Well, Nazism has this wonderful rhetorical value as being one of the few philosophies that is universally regarded as being wholly "bad". Aside from a few nutcases - who most of the world recognize as abhorrent - nobody has anything good to say about Nazis. They are the go-to bad guys.
Mein Kampf is the Nazi bible, or at the very least a work of Nazi scripture. The common view of the book is that it must be evil through and through. I posit, however, that there exist passages in Mein Kampf - much like the bible - that are, if not ethically and morally good, at the very least neutral. If so, this would make it possible to - again, much like the bible - to selectively quote Mein Kampf and use it as an anchor for a moral philosophy.
Not that I'm in any way interested in rehabilitating National Socialism! The point here being that if you can find good in Mein Kampf, well, what does that say about the practice of selective quoting in the bible?
I think you can see where I'm headed with this.
Anyway, I have never read the book, so the postulation that it contains good/neutral passages remains (to me) unproven. Are they in there?
You are in a negotiation. The company has made you an initial offer - the half-month free hosting - and that initial offer has a dollar value associated with it.
You have been inconvenienced, and it took time to rectify the problem. Your inconvenience and time also has a dollar value associated with it. So what is it?
I would work out the value of what you lost, add 20% for general hassle costs, and present that as a counter-offer to the company.
I would also work out the minimum value for which I would settle. It's less than getting everything I want (which you might get) but enough to counter-balance the additional hassle of hiring a lawyer and all those extra expenses.
Then negotiate. If they present an offer that is above your settle value, take it. If they don't, THEN you call the lawyer. Not only is this likely to arrive at a mutually agreeable solution without lawyers taking a cut, if you do wind up hiring a lawyer, you give him more to work with "my client made a perfectly acceptable counter offer and you refused it" etc.
Lawyers can be a useful tool, and sometimes they are necessary, but a reasonable negotiation can also work. You just need to understand your position first.
No, I don't think that's the one (although I may be mentally mixing details from that one with the other)
The one I'm thinking of had wholesale fabricated data, and this data set would up being used by a number of other studies who didn't realize that the data books were cooked.
I do wish I could provide more detail, but I don't have it with me at the moment and can't really take the time right now to track it down.
There was a big story a couple of years ago - I'm sorry that I don;'t have the details readily availible, but Google could probably find it - in which the data from which a number of prominent "human global warming" studies drew their facts turned out to have been deliberately falsified.
I want to say it came out of England but I may be mistaken.
Not just cherry-picked (although that happens too) but made up from whole cloth.
Because science isn't a democracy. Majority doesn't rule. I don't care if 90% of the "experts" think that the earth is the centre of the solar system, or that fire is a product of philostegon, or that light travels through the luminous aether (all perfectly reasonable postulates that were at one time held as fact by the majority of the learned) when there is data and experiment that suggests a helocentric solar system, rapid oxidation, and electromagnetic waves as alternates.
There are studies that arrive at a conclusion of human-caused global warming. There are studies that arrive at human-caused global COOLING. There are studies that find global warming of a scale similar to temperature swings in the past, and those that claim that the current swing is unprecidented.
And instead of all these studies being studied in aggrigate and being used to fine-tune the overall picture, the respective "sides" just yell at each other and - even worse from a scientific perspective - agressively seek to discredit the other and ruthlessly surpress dissenting opinions.
You don't need to look any farther than the moderation history for this comment tree; back and forth between "Insightful", "Informative". and "Overrated". And it is the "Overrated" that I find most telling; rather than debate the facts, attempt to surpress the discussion - the tactics one expects of the big-business backed "anti" crowd, not the supposedly dispassionate and logical "science" crowd.
So I have chosen #1 and #2, and I find that the facts as presented are non-compelling either way, and I further find that the tactics used especially by the "it's happening" side are both frightening and inconsistant with the scientific method. That doesn't mean they are WRONG (the dissenting picture painted by the facts prevents either side from claiming victory) but it sure isn't helping anything.
There is an element of truth to that - if, for example, someone determined that the root cause of all cancer was masturbation and that all cancers everywhere could be eliminated by eliminating masturbation, he'd face quite the uphill battle to both prove it and effect the behavioral change.
But there is a difference between getting the public to accept a difficult or challenging truth, and the kinds of fraud and groupthink that is happening right now amongst those who study global warming/climate change. If you do a study which determines that, within the boundaries of your study, human effected climate change is not happening, or that at least a proposed mechanism is not being observed, and then publish those results, your peers will seek to ruthlessly discredit you, you run the risk of losing your funding , and in many cases, your job.
One could argue that the "broadly held opinion" is that "climate change is happening" and those struggling to overturn it are those whose studies show otherwise.
I am agnostic not because I am "ignorant", but because my analysis of the studies that I have read - many, many of them - arrives at the following conclusions:
1. Neither case is particularly compelling; and
2. Both cases are presented by people with vested interests and evidence of fraud, so neither side is particularly trustworthy.
Thank you, by the way, for providing an example that proves my point. You regurgitate the groupthink, and instead of relying on science to make your argument for you, instead immediately go to an attack on the man, rather than the facts. This is the sort of behavior that makes me profoundly distrustful of the proponents of "global warming" as a postulate.
When Europe came out of the Little Ice Age, temperatures warmed up even faster than what has been observed lately.
Look, when it comes to the whole "Global Warming" thing, I'm an agnostic. I have no dog in the fight; no ox of mine will be gored one way or the other. I am perfectly willing to be convinced either way, and I'm equally skeptical of both sides.
It is not lost on me, for example, that the big oil companies and other major industrial emitters tend to be on the side - by which I mean "fund" - the studies that argue strongest for the "it ain't happening" side. That's as you'd expect; that the short term profit motive and general bad behavior of these sorts of organizations would motivate them to attempt to refute and deny any soi-disant "inconvenient truths".
But on the other hand, the "it's happening and it's all human activity" side is RIFE with corruption, falsified studies, poor models, groupthink, and generally shitty behavior too. Some of this we can chalk up to normal primate "Gorillas in the Mist" social (bad) behavior - but certainly not ALL of it. Not even MOST of it.
If the case for man-made global warming was so compelling, there would be no need for all these shenanigans. The science should be able to stand on its own. And yet, it clearly does not.
There are aspects of the "reduce the carbon" movement that I can fully support. Fuel efficiency, for example (energy efficiency in general for that matter) is a great idea on its own merits. We really don't know what the fossil fuel supply reserves really are, and anything that conserves fuel is ultimately a good thing. The same thing with protecting forest areas and reforestation/greening in general (green roofs and the like) These measures all have compelling arguments for them without playing the global warming bugaboo.
But as it sits right now, all the arm-waving and Strongly Worded Claims aren't doing anything to address the problems that people like myself have with the underlying science. The case is not at all made.
Firstly, you have no idea how happy I am to finally reach a human being at Garmin. Seriously, when every single official communication has "you may not hear back from us" in it... well it is very frustrating.
That avionics "get it right up front" philosophy has not been my experience at all. The Rino was like that - not a single bug (but also an older codebase) but the Palm software for the GPS 10, the nuvi 765, and especially the Edge 705 have been very much "customer tested" devices.
Just look at the release history for the 705.
I don't mind "customer testing" when bug fixes are pushed out quickly. But when bugs sit for a long time, then I start getting upset.
The infinite reboot bug on the 765 I lived with for years. The Powertap wheel size, cadence, and spurious pauses I have been living with since Sept when I got the Powertap. All bugs were dilligently reported and I heard nothing since.
I really want you tolook at the internal bug tracker for these devices and let me know their status and the release schedule for the fixes. I'll settle for you raising these issues internally so maybe they'll get fixed.
1. OK, I'll give that a try - but I don't expect that it will work, because there are a ton of people on the Garmin forums complaining about this issue. The changelog from the next-to-latest to latest version indicated a fix for this issue, but it clearly didn't work. So it was on the radar for a while at least. It is really pissing people off (the 705 isn't cheap) but Garmin has been totally uncommunicative.
2. Got it, thanks.
3. This is another long-standing "known problem". There is a steady stream of broken sensors being sent to Garmin for repair and has been for years. I'm frankly amazed that there hasn't been a fix yet.
4. OK, cool. It would be good to get a definitive answer, but so far so good.... Good to know about the Audible player. As much as I friggin' hate the Audible subscription business model, audiobooks are THE best way to make long trips feel shorter, and having the player in the GPS (especially because the GPS can cut in for directions without losing track of the book) is sheer friggin' genius.
Now, an observation:
I've been a very long time Garmin customer. I've got one of those yellow bargin-basement devices, a Rino 520 for work, a nuvi for the car, a 705 and 500 for the bikes, and even a GPS-10 bluetooth reciever I used to use with my Palm Lifedrive. So I'm familliar with Garmin products and the Garmin way of doing things.
Garmin clearly believes in "release early, release often", especially with device firmware (desktop software not so much). Early versions of device firmware typically lack features and have more than a few bugs, but there will be a constant stream of updates which fix bugs and add features.
Sometimes there are regressions and new bugs created, but that's software development for you.
But when you use customers as testers like this - which is fine; that's the Open Source development model less the open source and the ability to submit patches - there needs to be a communication channel back to the customers to let them know what is going on.
As it sits right now, customers communicate bugs, that goes into a black hole, and there is no feedback on where the bug is, if it is being looked at, or where the plans are for future development.
As was pointed out in earlier posts, these devices remain viable for a very long time - and they ain't cheap. Yes, I get that the Edge 800 is the new thing and that is going to suck up development resources, and I'm OK with new features not necessarily being backported to older devices. But I *DO* expect that known bugs with existing devices get examined and fixed. And as a customer, I want to know *when* the bug is going to get fixed. I don't need it (necessarily) fixed right this second, but I do expect that it will be addressed eventually.
If you browse the Garmin forums, you will find all sorts of customers who love their devices and want to see bugs fixed, and who are tremendously frustrated with Garmin's lack of communication back to them.
Can you communicate this to your bosses? Or is this a mater of Garmin policy?
1. I have an Edge 705 with the latest firmware (3.30 I think) There are a couple of outstanding problems with this firmware, specifically relating to interaction with my CycleOps power meter. First, it auto-calculates wheel size to a ridiculous 1500mm (should be on the order of 2100mm). Secondly, it generates occasional spurious auto-pauses even though the bike is in full motion. And thirdly, the cadence signal is highly erratic. This may or may not be related to my owning an early 705 that I think has a little less internal memory (my experiences with some firmware versions haven't exactly tracked other people's - with the exception of one version that routinely corrupted save files, my device has been somewhat more stable than many others) Is there going to be a firmware revision to fix these issues, or has the new Edge 800 sucked away all the development resources?
2. Related, it appears that the device takes speed and cadence information from the power meter no matter what, even if there is a GSC-10 on the bike. A firmware option to select which sensor is actually used would be great.
3. The GSC-10 speed/cadence sensor is REALLY fragile. I've killed three of them so far. Is a revised model in the works? I'm amazed you went reed switch instead of Hall effect.
4. I have a Nuvi 765T. Great unit, and I LOVE the Audible.com player feature it has (that seems to have been dropped for all Nuvis since). However, it has a problem where after some number of off/on cycles, it goes into an infinate reboot cycle on power on, that can be fixed by the "hold the lower corner" and delete user settings trick. This resets the counter and it is good for a while again. It is annoying because I can't keep user settings. There was a firmware update that I uploaded this xmas and it hasn't done it since (so maybe it was fixed) - was this on the internal bug tracker?
Thanks... but really, I *am* the norm. If anything, I'm a somewhat pale example of the norm.
Certainly the Canadian norm, and not that different from the American norm.
Yanks are, unquestionably, more willing to shoot earlier and with bigger guns. They haven't quite taken on all the counterinsurgency lessons that we have as equally as we have - but that's a question of it being a bigger army (and thus taking longer for change to fully propegate, and to an extent, taking less time per soldier for training) more than it is a question of ability.
A universal military problem is that the public sees when we fuck up, but they don't see when they get it right. It is easy to get coverage of naked prisoner pyramids and pissing on corpses than it is coverage of little girls going to school for the first time in generations or the ANP only being half stoned (instead of all stoned) today.
And it's not that the fuckups shouldn't get published - they should - but the lack of reporting on successes can be frustrating.
I don't have a definitive answer for you. The decisions on where state money and effort is spent come from the elected, political side of the government. You'd have to ask them.
But allow me to offer up a couple of opinions:
The first is beware seeing government efforts in zero-sum terms: "why do we fund X, when we could be funding Y instead?" Odds are both X AND Y are important and laudable and can be tackled concurrently; it is the BALANCE that needs tuning.
The second is that things like jobs, the economy, education, and social assistance are not the sole provenience of the state. Yes, the state can, does, and should influence these things, but ordinary citizens can have as much or more effect through private actions on these criteria as can the state. And even if we want to debate the "as much or more" clause of that statement, at least private citizens have the opportunity to do so - you can, for example, right this second hire someone, volunteer as a tutor or for a charity providing a social service, or donate to a charity that funds the same. But you cannot arbitrarily fund military actions - that IS the sole provenience of the state, and for good reason too.
That does not mean I'm one of those "privatize all the things!" Thatcherites. I'm very skeptical of the profit motive in things like health care. Government may be inefficient, but at least the government employee wants to see the service delivered, rather than avoiding delivering the service so as to increase profits (insurance companies don't make money by *paying* claims) But the private sector - personal as well as corporate - takes on some of these social responsibilities, where the use of armed force is a wholly state responsibility.
Guy is digging in a culvert, lays something down, covers it up, and walks away. At least, that's sure what it looks like. But the angle on the drone camera isn't quite right so it's not super clear. And we know that farmers sometimes dig irrigation ditches away from culverts, and they do it at night when it is cooler.
We're pretty sure we've just seen an IED go in, but it isn't cut and dried. There is reasonable doubt. So no shoot. Send EOD to look the next morning, and find an IED.
I don't have to be fluent in written Dari or Pashto (Uzbek and Turkman is in the north) because a ridiculously tiny percentage of Kandaharis are literate - there's another Taliban legacy; enforced illiteracy.
There was no beer; the mission was dry.
The TOC had A/C, yes, but there was precious little "shooting the breeze" - we were far too busy to waste much time.
And it wasn't necessary to interview every single inhabitant, any more than it is necessary to interview every single inhabitant of any country to get the truth. You are being purposely pedantic rather than listening to an eyewitness - probably because the eyewitness contradicts your carefully nurtured preconceptions.
The Taliban constantly pressured the local populace to grow poppy and pot. It was how they financed all their operations. Being Taliban has WAY more to do with drugs than ideology (although you cannot separate the Pashtun from Pashtunwali)
That "the Taliban eliminated poppy farming" trope is a myth. The Taliban eliminated COMPETITION in poppy farming.
ISAF left the poppy farmers alone as a matter of policy, because it meant depriving a farmer of what little livelihood he had left. We pushed alternative crops (wheat, grapes, pomegranates) very hard, and where the security situation was good the farmers would happily take up the alternate crops (poppy farming is backbreaking manual labour) the Taliban were always keen t apply pressure to get the farmers growing poppy again.
At the time, the Taliban were not very well understood. They had only been in power a short while, and they were the cousins (in many cases quite literally) of the Mujaheddin who we had supported during the Soviet occupation. There is also a school of thought that if you make someone into a complete pariah, you lose the opportunity to influence their future choices and help them change their ways toward something more acceptable.
It is also worth noting that Afghanistan had been locked in civil war for almost a decade, and the emergence of a strong central government - no matter their ideology - opened the door to the idea that maybe the Afghan ship was finally righting itself. Maybe these new Taliban guys would turn out to be the saviors of Afghan society and the start of something like an Afghan peace.
Sadly, this turned out to not be the case, as the events of 2001 ultimately proved.
You've never made a new friend, only to find out he's really an asshole?
Not that I doubt the ability of Bush and his like to hold their nose and get on with it when there is money to be made, and no doubt there is a certain cynical calculus of self-interest whenever business interests interact with dictators and other less than ideal state governments. I am no fan of Bush. But at the same time, there is no question that the truth about the Taliban had still not fully come to light.
Get this straight: the people being targeted are very, very bad men. They are personally responsible for the death and maiming of hundreds upon hundreds of people. And not just soldiers (who one could attempt to make the case for being, in some sense, "legitimate targets" for their actions) but mostly, in fact, innocents.
There is no doubt in my mind that killing these individuals reduces the amount of death and suffering in the world. I regard their killing with no more regret than I would the excising of a cancerous tumor.
And the fact that they can be killed without risking the lives of "the good guys" (American or not) nor innocents, is something to be celebrated.
There is no denying that soldiers have, in the heat of the moment, made terrible errors that has resulted in the deaths of innocents. Every one of those deaths is a tragedy. I reject the notion of "acceptable collateral damage" as do many of my peers. These strikes are a way to do that. I never once saw a UAV strike that hit an innocent. That does not mean that it never happened (although I have no firsthand knowledge of any, nor, for that mater, rumours) and Murphy's Law being what it is, it is unrealistic to expect that there will never be a mistake. But I CAN state that the time a UAV buys you for careful analysis and consideration of the target before committing has, at the very least, enormously reduced the number of errors.
Until bad men stop doing bad things, I call this "progress".
It is true that we stand on a slippery slope. There is a risk that the political body that provides the authority for strikes may expand the selection of targets beyond those of the very bad men who are currently targeted, to targets for whom the targeting criteria are more nebulous. It is right and good that we as a society question the who, when, where, and why of these strikes, and it is the duty of every citizen to ensure that they participate in the political process and keep a grip on those who are, quite literally, calling the shots. And I assure you that those making the final "shoot/no shoot" call take their responsibilities very seriously and do not treat it as "a video game". I expect this will continue.
The point about torture is well taken. Torture is NEVER justified. Not only does it not produce useful information (people will say anything under torture) its use does immense harm to your cause. It is very, very difficult for a torturer to lay claim to the moral high ground.
So we agree there.
But having had first-hand experience with UAV strikes, I am a big fan. Partially because UAVs are very good at minimizing collateral damage; they use precision munitions with a very small footprint. You get orders of magnitude less damage (of all kinds) than you do with big stick munitions like air strikes or cruise missiles.
But the true value of a UAV is that it allows you to be patient, take your time, and ensure that the target really is what you think it is and that conditions - all conditions - are ideal for the shot. I can't tell you the number of times when I saw UAVs with legit targets NOT shoot because the identity of the target was in question or because the risk of collateral damage too great. And with no jet jockey hopped up on amphetamines itching to drop his bombs in the air (and the sole determinant of if he drops or not) you instead get careful and reasoned opinion on go/no go from a panel of experts, legal and otherwise.
With nobody from your side at risk, attacks need not be made on snap decisions in the heat of battle by people scared for their lives. Instead, the decisions are made by safe, clear-thinking minds with more on their minds than just killing.
I spent seven months in Kandahar City as part of ISAF. I say this so you know that I have seen the ground truth, not just whatever story comes out of whatever news outlet you care to believe.
The Taliban were providing direct aid and sanctuary to the people who carries out the 9/11 attacks, and then refused to hand them over for prosecution - or indeed, to enforce any limits on their activities in any way. This makes that regime an active accessory to international terrorism and indeed a legitimate threat.
On top of that, I cannot imagine any group of people less suited to govern a nation than the Taliban. During my tour, a couple of Taliban chose to douse a group of Afghan schoolgirls with concentrated acid, killing some, and horribly disfiguring the others - for the crime of attending school. Not a Western-funded school; an Afghan-started, Afghan-operated school teaching girls to read. This sort of despicable and flatly inhuman act was Taliban policy. There is NOTHING good about the Taliban. They are bigoted narco-thugs who actively seek to erase any sign of civilization, law, and order in the attempt to eliminate opposition to their drug farming slavery campaigns. The Afghan campaign was, is, and remains a just war.
The crying shame of the Bush administration was that, instead of applying a full-court-press to Afghanistan following the initial defeat of the Taliban and seeing the country Marshall Planned back to some form of stability, they took their eyes off the ball to go adventuring in Iraq. This allowed the Taliban to re-invent themselves as an insurgency, rebuild, and become a destabilizing force that has slowed reconstruction to a crawl.
Although the world does not morn the passing of Saddam, Iraq was completely unjustified and the diversion of resources away from Afghanistan is, as far as I'm concerned, criminal. Afghanistan is NOT Iraq.
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I have had an essay peculating away in my brain for a while whose subject is the selective reading and quotation of various holy books.
The bible, for example, is full of all sorts of horrible things, but there are passages that contain "just", "lawful", "good", or "moral" stories and instructions - for simplicities' sake, let's call them the "bad" parts and the "good" parts.
Those who hold up any particular religious philosophy as the paragon of human virtue quote the "good" parts and ignore the "bad" parts.
Well, Nazism has this wonderful rhetorical value as being one of the few philosophies that is universally regarded as being wholly "bad". Aside from a few nutcases - who most of the world recognize as abhorrent - nobody has anything good to say about Nazis. They are the go-to bad guys.
Mein Kampf is the Nazi bible, or at the very least a work of Nazi scripture. The common view of the book is that it must be evil through and through. I posit, however, that there exist passages in Mein Kampf - much like the bible - that are, if not ethically and morally good, at the very least neutral. If so, this would make it possible to - again, much like the bible - to selectively quote Mein Kampf and use it as an anchor for a moral philosophy.
Not that I'm in any way interested in rehabilitating National Socialism! The point here being that if you can find good in Mein Kampf, well, what does that say about the practice of selective quoting in the bible?
I think you can see where I'm headed with this.
Anyway, I have never read the book, so the postulation that it contains good/neutral passages remains (to me) unproven. Are they in there?
DG
I don't thing you need a lawyer - yet.
You are in a negotiation. The company has made you an initial offer - the half-month free hosting - and that initial offer has a dollar value associated with it.
You have been inconvenienced, and it took time to rectify the problem. Your inconvenience and time also has a dollar value associated with it. So what is it?
I would work out the value of what you lost, add 20% for general hassle costs, and present that as a counter-offer to the company.
I would also work out the minimum value for which I would settle. It's less than getting everything I want (which you might get) but enough to counter-balance the additional hassle of hiring a lawyer and all those extra expenses.
Then negotiate. If they present an offer that is above your settle value, take it. If they don't, THEN you call the lawyer. Not only is this likely to arrive at a mutually agreeable solution without lawyers taking a cut, if you do wind up hiring a lawyer, you give him more to work with "my client made a perfectly acceptable counter offer and you refused it" etc.
Lawyers can be a useful tool, and sometimes they are necessary, but a reasonable negotiation can also work. You just need to understand your position first.
DG
No, I don't think that's the one (although I may be mentally mixing details from that one with the other)
The one I'm thinking of had wholesale fabricated data, and this data set would up being used by a number of other studies who didn't realize that the data books were cooked.
I do wish I could provide more detail, but I don't have it with me at the moment and can't really take the time right now to track it down.
DG
There was a big story a couple of years ago - I'm sorry that I don;'t have the details readily availible, but Google could probably find it - in which the data from which a number of prominent "human global warming" studies drew their facts turned out to have been deliberately falsified.
I want to say it came out of England but I may be mistaken.
Not just cherry-picked (although that happens too) but made up from whole cloth.
DG
Are you, perhaps, a Jesuit?
You appear to have a talent for the ruthless pursuit of heretics.
For all your chest beating, you present not a single fact - and, in so doing, continue to strengthen my initial point.
DG
Because science isn't a democracy. Majority doesn't rule. I don't care if 90% of the "experts" think that the earth is the centre of the solar system, or that fire is a product of philostegon, or that light travels through the luminous aether (all perfectly reasonable postulates that were at one time held as fact by the majority of the learned) when there is data and experiment that suggests a helocentric solar system, rapid oxidation, and electromagnetic waves as alternates.
There are studies that arrive at a conclusion of human-caused global warming. There are studies that arrive at human-caused global COOLING. There are studies that find global warming of a scale similar to temperature swings in the past, and those that claim that the current swing is unprecidented.
And instead of all these studies being studied in aggrigate and being used to fine-tune the overall picture, the respective "sides" just yell at each other and - even worse from a scientific perspective - agressively seek to discredit the other and ruthlessly surpress dissenting opinions.
You don't need to look any farther than the moderation history for this comment tree; back and forth between "Insightful", "Informative". and "Overrated". And it is the "Overrated" that I find most telling; rather than debate the facts, attempt to surpress the discussion - the tactics one expects of the big-business backed "anti" crowd, not the supposedly dispassionate and logical "science" crowd.
So I have chosen #1 and #2, and I find that the facts as presented are non-compelling either way, and I further find that the tactics used especially by the "it's happening" side are both frightening and inconsistant with the scientific method. That doesn't mean they are WRONG (the dissenting picture painted by the facts prevents either side from claiming victory) but it sure isn't helping anything.
Do you not see this?
DG
There is an element of truth to that - if, for example, someone determined that the root cause of all cancer was masturbation and that all cancers everywhere could be eliminated by eliminating masturbation, he'd face quite the uphill battle to both prove it and effect the behavioral change.
But there is a difference between getting the public to accept a difficult or challenging truth, and the kinds of fraud and groupthink that is happening right now amongst those who study global warming/climate change. If you do a study which determines that, within the boundaries of your study, human effected climate change is not happening, or that at least a proposed mechanism is not being observed, and then publish those results, your peers will seek to ruthlessly discredit you, you run the risk of losing your funding , and in many cases, your job.
One could argue that the "broadly held opinion" is that "climate change is happening" and those struggling to overturn it are those whose studies show otherwise.
DG
*facepalm*
I am agnostic not because I am "ignorant", but because my analysis of the studies that I have read - many, many of them - arrives at the following conclusions:
1. Neither case is particularly compelling; and
2. Both cases are presented by people with vested interests and evidence of fraud, so neither side is particularly trustworthy.
Thank you, by the way, for providing an example that proves my point. You regurgitate the groupthink, and instead of relying on science to make your argument for you, instead immediately go to an attack on the man, rather than the facts. This is the sort of behavior that makes me profoundly distrustful of the proponents of "global warming" as a postulate.
DG
Au contraire, mon ami.
When Europe came out of the Little Ice Age, temperatures warmed up even faster than what has been observed lately.
Look, when it comes to the whole "Global Warming" thing, I'm an agnostic. I have no dog in the fight; no ox of mine will be gored one way or the other. I am perfectly willing to be convinced either way, and I'm equally skeptical of both sides.
It is not lost on me, for example, that the big oil companies and other major industrial emitters tend to be on the side - by which I mean "fund" - the studies that argue strongest for the "it ain't happening" side. That's as you'd expect; that the short term profit motive and general bad behavior of these sorts of organizations would motivate them to attempt to refute and deny any soi-disant "inconvenient truths".
But on the other hand, the "it's happening and it's all human activity" side is RIFE with corruption, falsified studies, poor models, groupthink, and generally shitty behavior too. Some of this we can chalk up to normal primate "Gorillas in the Mist" social (bad) behavior - but certainly not ALL of it. Not even MOST of it.
If the case for man-made global warming was so compelling, there would be no need for all these shenanigans. The science should be able to stand on its own. And yet, it clearly does not.
There are aspects of the "reduce the carbon" movement that I can fully support. Fuel efficiency, for example (energy efficiency in general for that matter) is a great idea on its own merits. We really don't know what the fossil fuel supply reserves really are, and anything that conserves fuel is ultimately a good thing. The same thing with protecting forest areas and reforestation/greening in general (green roofs and the like) These measures all have compelling arguments for them without playing the global warming bugaboo.
But as it sits right now, all the arm-waving and Strongly Worded Claims aren't doing anything to address the problems that people like myself have with the underlying science. The case is not at all made.
DG
Firstly, you have no idea how happy I am to finally reach a human being at Garmin. Seriously, when every single official communication has "you may not hear back from us" in it... well it is very frustrating.
That avionics "get it right up front" philosophy has not been my experience at all. The Rino was like that - not a single bug (but also an older codebase) but the Palm software for the GPS 10, the nuvi 765, and especially the Edge 705 have been very much "customer tested" devices.
Just look at the release history for the 705.
I don't mind "customer testing" when bug fixes are pushed out quickly. But when bugs sit for a long time, then I start getting upset.
The infinite reboot bug on the 765 I lived with for years. The Powertap wheel size, cadence, and spurious pauses I have been living with since Sept when I got the Powertap. All bugs were dilligently reported and I heard nothing since.
I really want you tolook at the internal bug tracker for these devices and let me know their status and the release schedule for the fixes. I'll settle for you raising these issues internally so maybe they'll get fixed.
Thanks.
DG
I, quite literally, own t-shirts older than you.
Just sayin'
DG
1. OK, I'll give that a try - but I don't expect that it will work, because there are a ton of people on the Garmin forums complaining about this issue. The changelog from the next-to-latest to latest version indicated a fix for this issue, but it clearly didn't work. So it was on the radar for a while at least. It is really pissing people off (the 705 isn't cheap) but Garmin has been totally uncommunicative.
2. Got it, thanks.
3. This is another long-standing "known problem". There is a steady stream of broken sensors being sent to Garmin for repair and has been for years. I'm frankly amazed that there hasn't been a fix yet.
4. OK, cool. It would be good to get a definitive answer, but so far so good.... Good to know about the Audible player. As much as I friggin' hate the Audible subscription business model, audiobooks are THE best way to make long trips feel shorter, and having the player in the GPS (especially because the GPS can cut in for directions without losing track of the book) is sheer friggin' genius.
Now, an observation:
I've been a very long time Garmin customer. I've got one of those yellow bargin-basement devices, a Rino 520 for work, a nuvi for the car, a 705 and 500 for the bikes, and even a GPS-10 bluetooth reciever I used to use with my Palm Lifedrive. So I'm familliar with Garmin products and the Garmin way of doing things.
Garmin clearly believes in "release early, release often", especially with device firmware (desktop software not so much). Early versions of device firmware typically lack features and have more than a few bugs, but there will be a constant stream of updates which fix bugs and add features.
Sometimes there are regressions and new bugs created, but that's software development for you.
But when you use customers as testers like this - which is fine; that's the Open Source development model less the open source and the ability to submit patches - there needs to be a communication channel back to the customers to let them know what is going on.
As it sits right now, customers communicate bugs, that goes into a black hole, and there is no feedback on where the bug is, if it is being looked at, or where the plans are for future development.
As was pointed out in earlier posts, these devices remain viable for a very long time - and they ain't cheap. Yes, I get that the Edge 800 is the new thing and that is going to suck up development resources, and I'm OK with new features not necessarily being backported to older devices. But I *DO* expect that known bugs with existing devices get examined and fixed. And as a customer, I want to know *when* the bug is going to get fixed. I don't need it (necessarily) fixed right this second, but I do expect that it will be addressed eventually.
If you browse the Garmin forums, you will find all sorts of customers who love their devices and want to see bugs fixed, and who are tremendously frustrated with Garmin's lack of communication back to them.
Can you communicate this to your bosses? Or is this a mater of Garmin policy?
DG
Outstanding.
1. I have an Edge 705 with the latest firmware (3.30 I think) There are a couple of outstanding problems with this firmware, specifically relating to interaction with my CycleOps power meter. First, it auto-calculates wheel size to a ridiculous 1500mm (should be on the order of 2100mm). Secondly, it generates occasional spurious auto-pauses even though the bike is in full motion. And thirdly, the cadence signal is highly erratic. This may or may not be related to my owning an early 705 that I think has a little less internal memory (my experiences with some firmware versions haven't exactly tracked other people's - with the exception of one version that routinely corrupted save files, my device has been somewhat more stable than many others) Is there going to be a firmware revision to fix these issues, or has the new Edge 800 sucked away all the development resources?
2. Related, it appears that the device takes speed and cadence information from the power meter no matter what, even if there is a GSC-10 on the bike. A firmware option to select which sensor is actually used would be great.
3. The GSC-10 speed/cadence sensor is REALLY fragile. I've killed three of them so far. Is a revised model in the works? I'm amazed you went reed switch instead of Hall effect.
4. I have a Nuvi 765T. Great unit, and I LOVE the Audible.com player feature it has (that seems to have been dropped for all Nuvis since). However, it has a problem where after some number of off/on cycles, it goes into an infinate reboot cycle on power on, that can be fixed by the "hold the lower corner" and delete user settings trick. This resets the counter and it is good for a while again. It is annoying because I can't keep user settings. There was a firmware update that I uploaded this xmas and it hasn't done it since (so maybe it was fixed) - was this on the internal bug tracker?
That's a start...
DG
Do you work for Garmin?
If so, that would be awesome, because I have some questions for a Garmin engineer.
DG
Thanks... but really, I *am* the norm. If anything, I'm a somewhat pale example of the norm.
Certainly the Canadian norm, and not that different from the American norm.
Yanks are, unquestionably, more willing to shoot earlier and with bigger guns. They haven't quite taken on all the counterinsurgency lessons that we have as equally as we have - but that's a question of it being a bigger army (and thus taking longer for change to fully propegate, and to an extent, taking less time per soldier for training) more than it is a question of ability.
A universal military problem is that the public sees when we fuck up, but they don't see when they get it right. It is easy to get coverage of naked prisoner pyramids and pissing on corpses than it is coverage of little girls going to school for the first time in generations or the ANP only being half stoned (instead of all stoned) today.
And it's not that the fuckups shouldn't get published - they should - but the lack of reporting on successes can be frustrating.
DG
I don't have a definitive answer for you. The decisions on where state money and effort is spent come from the elected, political side of the government. You'd have to ask them.
But allow me to offer up a couple of opinions:
The first is beware seeing government efforts in zero-sum terms: "why do we fund X, when we could be funding Y instead?" Odds are both X AND Y are important and laudable and can be tackled concurrently; it is the BALANCE that needs tuning.
The second is that things like jobs, the economy, education, and social assistance are not the sole provenience of the state. Yes, the state can, does, and should influence these things, but ordinary citizens can have as much or more effect through private actions on these criteria as can the state. And even if we want to debate the "as much or more" clause of that statement, at least private citizens have the opportunity to do so - you can, for example, right this second hire someone, volunteer as a tutor or for a charity providing a social service, or donate to a charity that funds the same. But you cannot arbitrarily fund military actions - that IS the sole provenience of the state, and for good reason too.
That does not mean I'm one of those "privatize all the things!" Thatcherites. I'm very skeptical of the profit motive in things like health care. Government may be inefficient, but at least the government employee wants to see the service delivered, rather than avoiding delivering the service so as to increase profits (insurance companies don't make money by *paying* claims) But the private sector - personal as well as corporate - takes on some of these social responsibilities, where the use of armed force is a wholly state responsibility.
DG
Guy is digging in a culvert, lays something down, covers it up, and walks away. At least, that's sure what it looks like. But the angle on the drone camera isn't quite right so it's not super clear. And we know that farmers sometimes dig irrigation ditches away from culverts, and they do it at night when it is cooler.
We're pretty sure we've just seen an IED go in, but it isn't cut and dried. There is reasonable doubt. So no shoot. Send EOD to look the next morning, and find an IED.
Legit target, ID in question. No shoot.
Does that answer your question?
DG
I'm not an American.
I don't have to be fluent in written Dari or Pashto (Uzbek and Turkman is in the north) because a ridiculously tiny percentage of Kandaharis are literate - there's another Taliban legacy; enforced illiteracy.
There was no beer; the mission was dry.
The TOC had A/C, yes, but there was precious little "shooting the breeze" - we were far too busy to waste much time.
And it wasn't necessary to interview every single inhabitant, any more than it is necessary to interview every single inhabitant of any country to get the truth. You are being purposely pedantic rather than listening to an eyewitness - probably because the eyewitness contradicts your carefully nurtured preconceptions.
DG
It is the rare murderer who has been:
1. Caught in the act and/or bragging openly about their murders;
2. Murdered tens to hundreds of people; and
3. Actively recruits more murderers.
DG
I was there, right?
The Taliban constantly pressured the local populace to grow poppy and pot. It was how they financed all their operations. Being Taliban has WAY more to do with drugs than ideology (although you cannot separate the Pashtun from Pashtunwali)
That "the Taliban eliminated poppy farming" trope is a myth. The Taliban eliminated COMPETITION in poppy farming.
ISAF left the poppy farmers alone as a matter of policy, because it meant depriving a farmer of what little livelihood he had left. We pushed alternative crops (wheat, grapes, pomegranates) very hard, and where the security situation was good the farmers would happily take up the alternate crops (poppy farming is backbreaking manual labour) the Taliban were always keen t apply pressure to get the farmers growing poppy again.
DG
At the time, the Taliban were not very well understood. They had only been in power a short while, and they were the cousins (in many cases quite literally) of the Mujaheddin who we had supported during the Soviet occupation. There is also a school of thought that if you make someone into a complete pariah, you lose the opportunity to influence their future choices and help them change their ways toward something more acceptable.
It is also worth noting that Afghanistan had been locked in civil war for almost a decade, and the emergence of a strong central government - no matter their ideology - opened the door to the idea that maybe the Afghan ship was finally righting itself. Maybe these new Taliban guys would turn out to be the saviors of Afghan society and the start of something like an Afghan peace.
Sadly, this turned out to not be the case, as the events of 2001 ultimately proved.
You've never made a new friend, only to find out he's really an asshole?
Not that I doubt the ability of Bush and his like to hold their nose and get on with it when there is money to be made, and no doubt there is a certain cynical calculus of self-interest whenever business interests interact with dictators and other less than ideal state governments. I am no fan of Bush. But at the same time, there is no question that the truth about the Taliban had still not fully come to light.
Hindsight, as they say, is 20:20.
DG
Indeed.
And one may state that this means that the West owes Afghanistan a deep debt and a moral duty to rectify that past mistake.
DG
Get this straight: the people being targeted are very, very bad men. They are personally responsible for the death and maiming of hundreds upon hundreds of people. And not just soldiers (who one could attempt to make the case for being, in some sense, "legitimate targets" for their actions) but mostly, in fact, innocents.
There is no doubt in my mind that killing these individuals reduces the amount of death and suffering in the world. I regard their killing with no more regret than I would the excising of a cancerous tumor.
And the fact that they can be killed without risking the lives of "the good guys" (American or not) nor innocents, is something to be celebrated.
There is no denying that soldiers have, in the heat of the moment, made terrible errors that has resulted in the deaths of innocents. Every one of those deaths is a tragedy. I reject the notion of "acceptable collateral damage" as do many of my peers. These strikes are a way to do that. I never once saw a UAV strike that hit an innocent. That does not mean that it never happened (although I have no firsthand knowledge of any, nor, for that mater, rumours) and Murphy's Law being what it is, it is unrealistic to expect that there will never be a mistake. But I CAN state that the time a UAV buys you for careful analysis and consideration of the target before committing has, at the very least, enormously reduced the number of errors.
Until bad men stop doing bad things, I call this "progress".
It is true that we stand on a slippery slope. There is a risk that the political body that provides the authority for strikes may expand the selection of targets beyond those of the very bad men who are currently targeted, to targets for whom the targeting criteria are more nebulous. It is right and good that we as a society question the who, when, where, and why of these strikes, and it is the duty of every citizen to ensure that they participate in the political process and keep a grip on those who are, quite literally, calling the shots. And I assure you that those making the final "shoot/no shoot" call take their responsibilities very seriously and do not treat it as "a video game". I expect this will continue.
DG
The point about torture is well taken. Torture is NEVER justified. Not only does it not produce useful information (people will say anything under torture) its use does immense harm to your cause. It is very, very difficult for a torturer to lay claim to the moral high ground.
So we agree there.
But having had first-hand experience with UAV strikes, I am a big fan. Partially because UAVs are very good at minimizing collateral damage; they use precision munitions with a very small footprint. You get orders of magnitude less damage (of all kinds) than you do with big stick munitions like air strikes or cruise missiles.
But the true value of a UAV is that it allows you to be patient, take your time, and ensure that the target really is what you think it is and that conditions - all conditions - are ideal for the shot. I can't tell you the number of times when I saw UAVs with legit targets NOT shoot because the identity of the target was in question or because the risk of collateral damage too great. And with no jet jockey hopped up on amphetamines itching to drop his bombs in the air (and the sole determinant of if he drops or not) you instead get careful and reasoned opinion on go/no go from a panel of experts, legal and otherwise.
With nobody from your side at risk, attacks need not be made on snap decisions in the heat of battle by people scared for their lives. Instead, the decisions are made by safe, clear-thinking minds with more on their minds than just killing.
DG
I spent seven months in Kandahar City as part of ISAF. I say this so you know that I have seen the ground truth, not just whatever story comes out of whatever news outlet you care to believe.
The Taliban were providing direct aid and sanctuary to the people who carries out the 9/11 attacks, and then refused to hand them over for prosecution - or indeed, to enforce any limits on their activities in any way. This makes that regime an active accessory to international terrorism and indeed a legitimate threat.
On top of that, I cannot imagine any group of people less suited to govern a nation than the Taliban. During my tour, a couple of Taliban chose to douse a group of Afghan schoolgirls with concentrated acid, killing some, and horribly disfiguring the others - for the crime of attending school. Not a Western-funded school; an Afghan-started, Afghan-operated school teaching girls to read. This sort of despicable and flatly inhuman act was Taliban policy. There is NOTHING good about the Taliban. They are bigoted narco-thugs who actively seek to erase any sign of civilization, law, and order in the attempt to eliminate opposition to their drug farming slavery campaigns. The Afghan campaign was, is, and remains a just war.
The crying shame of the Bush administration was that, instead of applying a full-court-press to Afghanistan following the initial defeat of the Taliban and seeing the country Marshall Planned back to some form of stability, they took their eyes off the ball to go adventuring in Iraq. This allowed the Taliban to re-invent themselves as an insurgency, rebuild, and become a destabilizing force that has slowed reconstruction to a crawl.
Although the world does not morn the passing of Saddam, Iraq was completely unjustified and the diversion of resources away from Afghanistan is, as far as I'm concerned, criminal. Afghanistan is NOT Iraq.
DG