Comment Re:What is science? (Score 1) 355
Science free of observations and experiments?
Comment What is science? (Score 1) 355
Science: systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.
For observations you need data. You will also need something to test your experiments against... Data. You can either collect it yourself or purchase it if it is already available. Are the republicans offering to purchase the data or are they rent seekers?
Comment Re:How is this a bad thing? (Score 2) 355
I RTFA and don't get the controversy.
Are these same republicans also providing additional funds for the EPA to purchase privately held data sets or are they defunding the EPA? Or do the republicans want to use the coercive power of the state to force other people to provide the EPA, gratis, the fruits of their labor?
for instance, as a scientist I may want to purchase a data set for my study. I am not entitled to provide that data set to others. I can document my methods and others can purchase that data set or an equivalent one and run the same or similar methods on it. There is no secrecy here but there is a private company with an asset that they are charging for. Should the science based on the asset be disqualified? Should the state purchase the data, and if so are the republicans willing to fund that? Should the state use force to commandeer the asset?
Comment Mind games (Score 4, Insightful) 89
not have to worry about if he thinks that I think, etc.
I think he's wrong on this. A computer would still need to consider what his opponent thinks he holds and raise accordingly.
Comment Re:so....why? (Score 4, Informative) 94
We get a lot of articles here that people say don't belong on Slashdot, but I usually side with them being good articles. "Stuff that matters" and all that, personal freedoms, general interest to nerds, etc. But this one...no, I'm just not seeing it. Nothing to do with personal freedoms, nothing to do with computers, nothing to do with public policy, absolutely zero effect on any of us, even those of us in the USA. It's just political celebrity news.
Except that his indiscretions were discovered because his electronic cloak-and-dagger skills weren't what he thought they were, and that the FBI discovered this in an electronic dragnet, and that he, the director of the CIA, disclosed state secrets to his soon-to-be-jealous lover, which constitutes a greater potential breach of security than Snowden and Assange combined....
But aside from that, yeah, no relevance to the life of the average geek. None whatsoever.
Comment Re:I don't know what to think (Score 1) 407
the greatest authoritarian government, run by the most fascist, megalomaniacal, sadistic person who has ever lived, would find no better tool of absolute control than mandatory hard drug use like meth,
Why not? He took them himself: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
A 2-Year-Old Has Become the Youngest Person Ever To Be Cryonically Frozen 313
merbs writes: After losing a long battle with brain cancer, 2-year-old Matheryn Naovaratpong became the first minor ever to be cryogenically frozen. This article is the story of how a Thai girl was frozen in Bangkok and shipped to Arizona to have her brain preserved in liquid nitrogen, while medical science works on a cure. "Typically we’d move the head from the trunk of the body. We didn't know what their reaction would be from the family, the mortuary, from border officials; this has to go through a number of shipping venues, customs, the TSA and so on. To see a frozen head in a box might have raised a number of red flags. In the U.S. that’s not a big deal, but there, they may not be accustomed."
Comment Re:Why is it even a discussion? (Score 1) 441
Wait, what was so bad about the Internet one month ago, again? I'm pretty sure Net Neutrality was still the de facto standard.
If nothing's changed, then why do we need a law to un-change the unchanged?
Comment Re: No mystery at all (Score 1) 111
According to TFA: Likely candidates include venting from oil and gas activities, which are primarily coalbed methane exploration and extraction in this region; active coal mines; and natural gas seeps... The Four Corners coal-fired power plant, near Farmington, is one of the targets Nasa wants to investigate as a possible cause of the methane
The Last Time Oceans Got This Acidic This Fast, 96% of Marine Life Went Extinct 417
merbs writes: The biggest extinction event in planetary history was driven by the rapid acidification of our oceans, a new study concludes (abstract). So much carbon was released into the atmosphere, and the oceans absorbed so much of it so quickly, that marine life simply died off, from the bottom of the food chain up. That doesn't bode well for the present, given the similarly disturbing rate that our seas are acidifying right now. A team led by University of Edinburgh researchers collected rocks in the United Arab Emirates that were on the seafloor hundreds of millions of years ago, and used the boron isotopes found within to model the changing levels of acidification in our prehistoric oceans. They now believe that a series of gigantic volcanic eruptions in the Siberian Trap spewed a great fountain of carbon into the atmosphere over a period of tens of thousands of years. This was the first phase of the extinction event, in which terrestrial life began to die out.
Comment Re:No mystery at all (Score 5, Informative) 111
Coal bed methane, that is in the cracks and pores of coals, is old, old and well known thing.
Yeah. It's even mentioned in TFA:
This indicates the methane emissions should not be attributed to fracking but instead to leaks in natural gas production and processing equipment in New Mexico's San Juan Basin, which is the most active coalbed methane production area in the country.
'The results are indicative that emissions from established fossil fuel harvesting techniques are greater than inventoried,' Kort said.
Comment Re:destroy the cell phone? (Score 1) 42
Wouldn't it be easier to change the SIM card? Destroy the old SIM card instead? Destroying the cell phone seems like a waste. Just delete the incoming call log.
Most phones have a unique handset (i.e. hardware) identifier which is accessible during a telephone or internet session. It's in firmware, but you may or may not be able to change it on demand.
Comment Re:WWJD? (Score 1) 1168
NO! In a democratic society, we should NEVER tolerate intolerance.
So, we should be intolerant of intolerance?
Of course not! That would be utterly intolerable!!
Experts: Aim of 2 Degrees Climate Goal Insufficient 442
An anonymous reader points out that a long held goal of keeping the Earth's average temperature from rising above 2 degrees Celsius might not be good enough. "A long-held benchmark for limiting global warming is 'utterly inadequate,' a leading U.N. climate scientist declared. Keeping the Earth's average temperature from rising past 2 degrees Celsius – a cap established by studies in the early 1970s – is far too loose a goal, Petra Tschakert, a professor at Penn State University and a lead author of an assessment report for the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, said in a commentary published in the journal Climate Change Responses. Already, with an average increase of just 0.8 degrees Celsius, she wrote, 'negative impacts' are 'widespread across the globe.' Tschakert called for lowering the warming target to 1.5 degrees Celsius."
Comment Re:I am a paid troll (Score 1) 269
The Heartland institute is paid by the fossil fuel industry to spread misinformation about climate change. Popular misinformation sites like WUWT have received $80,000 in a single year. Even as a lowly intern you can get a small piece of the pie. They'll pay you $150/week to comment on relevant blogs, newspaper articles, and social media.
