Debunked by a blog post parroted by Bayer? No you're okay, I prefer peer reviewed papers thanks, you know, actual science.

"but here's the top link from google when I search: http://www.theguardian.com/env..."

Great. A newspaper whose assertion of a cold 2012/2013 winter is trivially disprovable by actual MET office records which show that much of the winter was spent above the already relatively warm (historically) 1982 - 2010 average:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/cl...

Even on the coldest weeks it only just barely crept below 0c reaching -2c on only two occasions at worst. The UK hasn't had a truly cold winter now since 2010. All our winters have been incredibly mild since that point. This is what an actual cold UK winter looks like:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/cl...

Here are the other recent winters:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/cl...
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/cl...
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/cl...

So you see, using the UK as a point to suggest cold winters in recent years is laughable. In 2013/14 we barely dropped below average for a single day.

Besides, your assertion on Australia isn't even correct. There are plenty of issues in Australia too, whilst it may not be on the scale of other places, there are issues. As such, it's still entirely plausible that neonicotinids are a major contributing factor, and the fact that Australia always has warm weather merely cushions the impact. To pretend it's not happening at all there is just an outright lie.

So maybe stick to actual science and data, rather than blogs and newspaper articles. You might stop looking so much like a Bayer loving shill then.

Yeah it's nonsense, unlike oil, the vast majority of the world's Uranium deposits sit on Western/Western allied soil. There's no energy security threat to the West when it comes to Uranium because we have access to the vast majority of it. Australia and Canada alone hold 40% of the world's reserves.

Yeah, no. Damage increases by the fourth power of axle weight. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

It doesn't really matter what the tyres are inflated to, unless they're so large as to distribute the weight across an enormous surface area. But if that were the case, you wouldn't be able to get past a large truck--its wheels would take up the whole road.

"Except that IS has a religious rather than secular ideology."

Right, in the same way that the Taliban preach strong anti-homosexual views and cite that as a reason to fight the west because it dares to offer them equality all whilst having sex with boys?

If you haven't figured out that religion is commonly used as a tool of recruitment and control then you're probably out of your depth here. Throughout pretty much the entirety of human history religion has been claimed as the ideology and purpose, whilst simultaneously being ignored by the people who are leading those groups because they know it's an effectively tool for rallying the footsoldiers whatever you do and don't believe about it. For Saddam's old guard, when you no longer have the country, and know that Iranian funding and militias are moving into your country, there was simply no better option that to rally the Sunnis against Iran's staunch Shia movements.

"Hitler, the PIRA and Pol Pot all carried out atrocities, that doesn't make them ideologically similar."

Right, but Hitler, the PIRA, and Pol Pot weren't active in Iraq in recent history either. The fact that others have carried out atrocities in history is neither here nor there, the point is that Saddam's regime is the player in the region that has the most experience deploying these sorts of atrocities and using them as effective propaganda tools. IS isn't simply carrying out atrocities for the sake of it, the high profile ones are incredibly well planned - if you think it's as simple as "An infidel, lets kill him!" then you need to explain why they've kept John Cantlie alive when others have been beheaded. IS only carry out atrocities where the propaganda value is greater than the value of keeping them alive, that is, they don't carry out high profile atrocities because they're unthinking warped psycopaths, it is entirely planned, and done entirely with a propaganda goal in mind.

This is quite distinct to what Hitler did, because in contrast the worst atrocities such as the Nazi death camps were kept entirely secret.

But the irony is, in parroting popular myth you've highlighted that there is plenty of fodder out there who aren't aware of the fuller picture, highlighting that their methods work. You think they're just a bunch of rag tag terrorists, you think there's no organisation and that they'll go on surprising you by defeating organised forces.

The worst part is, a lot of it is even quite easy to verify. It's not even much of a secret that Adnan al-Sweidawi, one of Saddam's top lieutenants is in charges of IS' military council. It's not a secret that another of Saddam's lieutenants, Fadel al-Hayali is ISIS Iraq deputy. It's not a secret that the now deceased Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, America's King of Clubs from Saddam's regime was leading his own force that was instrumental in taking over Mosul, one Iraq's biggest cities, on behalf of ISIS. There are plenty more examples.

It's really only some elements (albeit some of the most prominent) of Western media that try to condense it all down into a ISIS = Terrorists = Unthinking bad people type simplistic world view, then act surprised when they turn out to be incredibly effective, more so than mere unthinking bad people could ever be. Unthinking bad people terrorists are folks like those who did the Glasgow airport attacks whereby they did more harm to themselves than anyone else, but it's pretty clear that the folks in Iraq/Syria are rather more competent, organised, and effective than that. That's precisely because they're led and run by experienced smart people (though still rather horrible smart people either way), not unthinking wannabe jihadists, no matter how simplistic some of the media want to try and make it.

That's the common Americanised view of how you could've made Iraq go better, but this is precisely the sort of ill conceived view that I suspect this book is trying to deal with.

The problem is that the Baath party was brutal. Like, really brutal. We're talking about the people who gassed the Kurds, who had no qualms with using human shields, and took no issue with putting power drills through the eyes of captured PoWs as a form of torture.

Given that, it'd be naive to think that that country wouldn't have collapsed into chaos at some point anyway in the exact same way that Libya, or Syria has. You would've also needed to moderate the Baath party to a level whereby it wasn't just gagging for an uprising too.

But, and this is something that review and presumably the book itself in more detail refers to and that's the fact that the Baath party didn't just vanish into non-existence.

In Western media we're constantly being given the impression that IS is a rag tag bunch of bandits. A bunch of local militants and a bunch of foreign militants that have teamed up to cause a bit of case. This begs the question, if they're so rag tag then how the hell are they managing to run a defacto state with all the institutions you'd expect from a state (even if rather warped) like courts, banks, industry, tax collection, communications, media and so on. How are they managing to stand firm against a standing army backed by the most powerful airforces in the world? How are they managing to stand firm against Iranian forces and militias? Against the Syria government with it's battle hardened soldiers and it's typically not available to rag tag militia Russian/Iranian equipment?

The answer? Because the idea that IS is just a bunch of rag tag militants is wholly false. IS is in large part the modern incarnation of the Baath party. Those atrocities they carry out? they're straight out of the Baath party's playbook from the last 40 years. That defacto state they run? It's got all the qualitities of a state because backing it are many professional judges, politicians, and business folk from Saddam era Iraq. Those battles they're fighting? those cities they're capturing? those are the cities they were born in, or served in under Saddam, these are the generals that fought powers like Iran in the 70s and 80s and won, those are the foot soldiers who comprised Saddam's Republican Guard which was one of the most effective special forces units in the region in the 80s and 90s. Every now and then, evidence of this slips through:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...

When you stop thinking of IS as a rag tag bunch of militants, and start understanding that much of their backbone is comprised of the remnants of Saddam's regime it makes a lot of other things clear. Those atrocities IS carries out? it's not simply because they're evil people (though they are), it's a continuation of the sort of shock and awe horror tactics that Saddam's regime was famous for. When you understand that much of IS is comprised of professional special forces and experienced generals from Saddam's era fighting in the regions they lived in and served in, it starts to be a lot more understandable as to how IS has made so much progress in Iraq. Then finally, in the context of your point on Iran, you begin to understand why IS and Iran are so interested in fighting each other, why the Kurds are willing to so vehemently fight IS even outside of their own territory helping the Yazidis in Iraq, and pushing well beyond Kobane and Kurdish Syrian regions - these are old scores that are being settled. It's the 80s Iran-Iraq war in continuation.

IS can stand up to nation state's standing armies, because it is a defacto nation state with a professional standing army of battle hardened experienced soldiers who know where the military bases are, how they're laid out, how to assault them, and where the guns are hidden, precisely because they used to be garrisoned in them. They know how to use all the military equipment they capture effectively including tanks, anti-aircraft guns, artillery, and countless types of guns and rocket launchers because they've been formally trained in it all when they bought the equipment in the first place all those years ago.

We didn't roll into Baghdad in such short order in 2003 simply because we have superior military power. We did so because Saddam's political base and military forces knew they'd be fighting a war they'd never win, so they melted into the population to fight a shadow war which we've seen their brutal effectiveness at ever since. By the time we turned up to fight them they'd already melted away. That's why it was so easy, but we didn't realise this, and we've paid the price ever since - the real solution therefore in Iraq would've been to ruthlessly hunt down those powers in every house in every street rather than assume the job was done, instead resulting in us getting caught up in a brutal proxy battle between Iranian backed forces, and Baathist backed forces.

Iran, Iraq et. al. are doing what they've done for decades. The West is pratting around at the edges, not really having a full grasp of what's going on instead being more worried about keeping up the idea that IS is just a bunch of rag tag militants that should be targeted and contained as such rather than a full blown state force that should've been hunted down and finished off over a decade ago.

I will pick up this book as it sounds like it covers a lot of these points that I've picked up here and there from Arab and Persian blogs and media over the last decade. It is not a coincidence that so many voices from Saddam's Iraq keep popping up inside IS and it's associates. If IS was just a rag tag bunch of militants, they'd be long done in by now by a coalition that comprises everyone from the Iranians to the Americans, and the Kurds to the Turks, and from the FSA to Al Nusra.

Because even if they were just tracking data of users who sign up, contrary to popular myth, peddled mostly by people who think they know the law but apparently don't, contracts are not magical legal instruments that overrule everything ever.

In just about every jurisdiction in the world contracts have limits. They cannot overrule statutory rights, you cannot sign away your life in a contract, you cannot sign away your legal responsibility for a crime onto someone else poor and desperate enough to be willing to take it for money.

Hence, it doesn't matter what is in a contract, if that contract doesn't adhere to the laws of the country in which the agreement is made then either the whole or that portion of the contract are meaningless and irrelevant.

Facebook doesn't get to rewrite the law, so rather than blaming users for agreeing to a section of a contract that has no legal merit in the first place, you should be asking, "Why can't Facebook adhere to the laws of the countries in which it chooses to operate if it wishes to operate there?". That's the real question- you see, your question is meaningless; Europeans ARE abiding by the contract they wilfully sign because it's a meaningless contract with large portions that hold no legal merit in the first place. It's not their fault Facebook wrote a contract that tries to claim rights that it has no legal standing to claim - that's Facebook's fault, they should've drafted a contract that's wholly enforceable within the confines of the law.

Most companies manage, but it seems a number of tech companies really struggle with it, because profit.

One or more of those words do not mean what you think they mean.

"I will close this piece with a truth. "For all their sins, ads fuel much of the Web. Cut them out and you're strangling the diversity of online publishers â" I think users really want that."

I think this is exactly right, you are indeed strangling diversity of publishers, but the problem is, I'm not convinced it matters.

The problem as I see it, is that monetisation of information on the web via ads has simply led to a rush for psychological "you should click this and see what happens next" type bullshit, as well as incredibly inflammatory and often false headlines in a desperate rush to further increase ad revenue.

As such, whilst it may increase diversity of publishers, I do not believe it's a useful increase in diversity of publishers.

But you still have two problems there. Firstly, when the US has had cold winters, Europe has had mild winters, yet suffered the exact same problem. So your argument of a correlation of cold winters is also false - it only correlates if you take an arbitrary subset of known data.

Secondly, you argue that usage of neonicotinoids don't correlate - at best you can say they don't appear to correlate in the data you have seen, but plenty of studies show otherwise. For example, this study finds a correlation between the use of imidacloprid and cold winters, rather than varroa mite and cold winters:

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/ne...

One could equally argue from this, and the European experience of mild winters, actually shows that neonicotinoids are in fact the common factor in the problem.

"What doesn't are vendor specific items like IE6, and if you were developing specifically for that, well, then you made a terrible choice, especially if it affected your entire application stack."

Oh stop showing you have no idea about software development. It's not about making a terrible choice, without being psychic one cannot make a better choice than supporting the two browsers that are used by the vast majority of the market. Not planning to support it when that's the status quo, and there's no obvious sign of impending change is utterly retarded. The fact that things did change is due to the unpredictable nature of technology.

"So apparently, the only thing that needed changing in your case was the GUI. If you knew squat about web development, that would have been a relatively minor thing to change, provided that you knew what you were doing in the first place. Building to IE6 indicates otherwise however."

The fact you think this shows how utterly out of your depth you are. The fact you believe you can blanket say that the UI is a small part of any project is utterly retarded, how do you know this? how do you know what the scope and scale of the project is? Stop talking about things you blatantly do not understand and cannot know about.

"No, what I need to be able to do is take technology today, as it exists, pick the proper components, even if they are alpha/beta, and ensure that my choices are kept up to date and do what they need to do, especially in the alpha/beta area. It's called tracking your dependencies, and it's not accomplished by tying yourself to maven central."

So in other words, use an agile process. Which is exactly what you're telling everyone not to do. Right.

"Have you worked in the real world? Generally a project is envisioned, then estimated and budgeted. This happens at the beginning of a project, because generally shareholders (public companies) don't like to spend 50M on a project (promised functionality) and not receive a working model."

Yes, and that's the point of Agile. It's designed to work in the real world where the only way you can truly estimate the amount of features you can implement for a specific cost is to actually do it. Thus, rather than pick a number and set of features out of thin air as with waterfall, you just set a budget, and keep rolling until you hit that budget, and what comes out is what is possible against that budget. If early on it looks like you're not even going to get close to the features you wanted for the budget, then you stop sprinting and fail early. This is far superior to failing late as with waterfall where you've blown your whole budget and ended up with something useless. Agile caters to change. That's the whole point.

Your description of GM and agile just further highlights that you don't know anything about agile. Agile doesn't demand that there are no communications between teams and stakeholders. The whole point of the job of stakeholders is that they're getting what they need, and if they're not working with other stakeholders to make it fit then what you're actually dealing with are inept project managers, which, guess what? also make waterfall projects fail on a regular basis. Retardation isn't limited to agile, nor is agile a magic cure for it.

"I'm describing the real world, how people try Agile, and how they and Agile fails. You can keep dreaming that it works"

Okay, I'll keep "dreaming" that it works, along with everyone that uses it to succesfully deliver projects, you know, like everyone from Google, to IBM, to Microsoft, to those government folks you falsely claimed only ever use waterfall:

http://www.cio.com/article/239...

People deliver with agile, the fact you claim they don't is evidence that you failed to implement it, or used the wrong tool for the job. That's not a defect with agile, that's a problem with your project leadership.

I've delivered large (multi-year projects) with both agile and waterfall, (and hybrids in between) using the right methodology for the task at hand. It can work well if you use it in the right place (e.g. UI development as you indirectly admitted above). If you've always failed with it, well, it sucks to be you. But I doubt you'll ever get it right if you blame the methodology rather than your processes. Plenty of companies, and plenty of massive projects do perfectly well with it though, so saying it doesn't work is patently false, and saying they do more than agile is a classic no true Scotsman fallacy.

"In essence, I practice neither process, but a project management style that is more dynamic that grew out of understanding waterfall's short-comings and agile lately claims some portions of as its own."

Most people do, and there's nothing wrong with that. But pretending agile doesn't ever work is as stupid as pretending waterfall never works. On the contrary, if you're building a bunch of pre-designed houses then waterfall works perfectly well because you know how long it takes you to build such a house when you've done it so many times before. Similarly, when you're doing something highly iterative in nature to get right, like UI work, then agile also works perfectly.

As an aside, I find it fascinating that all your examples seem to dodge software development and focus on things like cars, and government non-software projects. That, coupled with your other comments doesn't half make it look like you really do know fuck all about software development, especially as you seem to believe that trends in the technology world are reliably knowable a number of years ahead of time.

Also, you're arguing a metaphor.

Thus, probably unwittingly, cause if your comments on the topic lack anything clearly it is having wits behind them, you go off to hide in your corner from the straw bogeymen coming for your "stuff", clutching at your gun to defend you.
Because, clearly, poor people are getting ready to take everything from you. $1000 today and other nonsense.

Here's the thing boyo...
Can you shoot viruses with them guns of yours? How bout bacteria?
Can you shoot 'lectricity into your wires and oil and water into your pipes?
How about simply shoot some bread on your table?

You know... stuff that will appear suddenly as what amounts to entire nations (there are countries with fewer people than 3.5 million truckers alone) suddenly end up without food or medicine or pot to piss in, and in the long run, without the ground to bury their dead.
Following your "Fuck them I got mine" economic policy.

How many bullets does it take to stop that guy who's off his meds and out of a job but perfectly able to steal a truck, get drunk on stolen booze and go ramming it into other people's cars?
Or simply take HIS gun (You think you're the only one with a peashooter?) and gun you down for no reason cause he's off his meds? You some gun-ninja, with a six sense for danger?
No... not fear. We know you got that covered. DANGER-sense. Like what Spiderman has. No?
Well... no wonder you're shaking in your boots then... you'd have to be shooting at everyone you don't know.
And that's a lot of boo-lets...

How about that other guy who decides to steal the copper out of them power lines and gets both himself electrocuted AND takes out half the local grid in the process?
Are YOU gonna guard all the power lines everywhere by your own lonesome, clutching your pathetic little Saturday night special?
What's that? You're gonna PAY someone to guard them? Will that be $1000, $5000 or more? Lotsa them power lines...

BTW... did you know that you can use transformer oil (from power transformers) to run engines?
Yeah... And they like have these pathetic locks on them. You just kick them a little. Then you drill a hole in the transformer, drain the oil into a can and leave it to rot or catch fire. Someone will come along and strip it of the wiring later.
You're gonna pay that? Oh right... guns... Your gonna shoot the transformer into working. No... wait... you're gonna pay more guards and police...

But fuck that... right... You know what that oil does best? It works GREAT in chainsaws.
Heatin don't come free, you know. But LANDSLIDES do!
You're gonna love those... they take out houses, roads, tear up underground pipes...
You'll be paying that shit too, I know. Right after you shoot that landslide.

But hold on... Them poor people don't have medical or any kind of insurance.
You won't mind them going around all sick and stuff... urinating in your yard... taking shit where ever they can... and eventually dying all around your place.
Right-right... you're gonna shoot that too. Shoot the sick right out of them.
Then shoot the medicine and doctors INTO hospitals to treat YOU when you need them instead of all them poor people swamping the system.
Then you're gonna pay someone to bury/burn the corpses, sanitize everything, give you daily checkups to make sure you didn't catch anything... must be great to be able to afford all that on your private tropical island.

And that's all before your next door neighbor, your huntin/fishin/masturbatin buddy, comes to your door with a plan to shoot himself some stuff.
See... his trucking business went belly up on account of all them self-driving trucks not needing his local services in your neighborhood cause nobody's buying shit there anymore. So... nothing to transport.
You and your ex-billionaire buddy are the only ones there - and you got yourself all the shit you need behind your guns and walls and moats and crocodiles and drawbridges and all that other shit you built around your personal "one-person prison".

Come on... He's your buddy. He's just gonna shoot you a little. And take your crocodiles.

Even their aircraft worked on a form of teleportation.

As for the nukes... it was actually a case of many dirty bombs exploding under an energy shield, down through a hollowed out core of the planet which was mined for hundreds of thousands of years.

Here:

In the book, teleporters all check in with the homeworld at a set date to send back ore and to replenish their atmosphere, food and workforce stock.
As there is no hyperspace communication or FTL travel, once the Psychlo world gets turned into a "radioactive sun", everyone just keeps checking in, one at a time, and blowing themselves up.

To clear up...
Not every planet got turned into a sun. That happens only to the main planet which had that special breathing-gas of theirs which reacted violently to uranium.
On other planets, only their central mining camps around the teleporting platforms explode - with all their remaining supplies of atmosphere and food.
Which they can only get from their home planet.

Go to Red Letter Media (of the Mr. Plinkett Star Wars prequels reviews fame) and check out their Best of The Worst episodes.

Or just check out the Things review.

Battlefield Earth is Oscar-worthy compared to some schlock out there.

You just have to read it early enough... Like when you're 11-14.
Old enough to be interested in SciFi beyond simple space opera but not yet learned enough to be repelled by bad or pulpy writing. Though Hubbard sorta-kinda covered his ass there by claiming in-universe that the book was intentionally written that way.

E.g. On the inside cover of my library copy someone wrote "money is an idea backed with confidence".
Someone found that information so novel and fascinating, they had to write it down.
On the inside cover of the book they've read it from.

Just try imagining what could someone write on the inside of the DVD case of the movie.

Also, the book is full of some really fine pulpy action and adventure.
And it even manages to make negotiations and CONTRACTS exciting.
The movie literally put me to sleep first (and only) time I saw it.
Plus, the book is not dumb enough to have them flying harriers and raiding Fort Knox and doing all other nonsense which was not in the book.

Later though... One might find the book even more fascinating, but in a different way.
Like how much it echoes stories intentionally written to be a satire of an ultra-right pulp fairytale.
All of it clearly without the author realizing how steeped in those ideas his writing was.