We're actually ignoring it at the moment. There was a report created in 2008 that created a plan to cope with an expected maximum of 0.65 to 1.3 meter rise in 2100 and 2-4 meter rise of sea level in 2200. Deniers got in, screamed their harts out that this was unsubstantiated and that it would never rise that high, and the plan would anyway be too expensive. So there was no action. No doubt we'll revisit this soon, but we did lose a decade for prep work.

It seems you read a bit too much Taleb. When working with systems that exhibit finite variance, the mean certainly exists and is subject to the Central Limit Theorem, making all these nice Gaussian theories apply. Earth temperature definitely exhibits finite variance (ever seen a summer of 2,000 degrees?).

Here's a quick test to figure out if a system is exhibiting finite variance: take a sample of cases, and systematically leave one out and compute the mean and variance. Do they fluctuate like mad, then you have an 'long-tailed' system. Do they not, then you have a normal system. Many statistics of the physical wealth exhibit this. Take for instance 'average weight of the population'. If you have a sample of 1000 people and you leave out that one guy that weighs 600 pounds, the mean weight will not change dramatically. However, people's wealth works differently: take a sample of a 1000 people including a billionaire, him being in or out of the sample completely determines the mean. BTW, I took this example from one of Taleb's books.

There's a bit more to this as there is a region of these 'symmetric-alpha-stable' systems where there is no variance but still a stable mean before you get to a distribution as extreme as the Cauchy distribution, but in general, we have no evidence that earth temperature is even as dramatically fluctuating as the weight profile of the American population. Long-tailed statistics don't seem to apply here.

Oh, as long as we can retaliate if their opinion turned out wrong, I'd be happy to recognize their contribution into keeping the earth a dirty place if they turn out right.

You're right, temperatures have not gone up. The ten warmest years since 1901 are not all in the last two decades, and the last 38 years have not all been above the 20th century average. It's all a hoax, North-East America is experiencing harsh winters so there can be no global warming.

Couldn't agree more. 'Invented here syndrome' reads as if everything necessarily gets invented 'here', so roughly the same meaning as 'not invented here'. What the article writer probably means is something more akin to 'Not re-invented here'.

Traditionally, 'most fit' is measured in the units of fecundity, the expected number of offspring that reach reproductive age. So, 'survival of the fittest' actually means 'survival of the ones that get most offspring'. Although it has been argued, by Karl Popper no less, that this is a tautology in its own right, some relatively recent research has shown that in pre-biotic life, this is not necessarily true. You might get something best characterized as 'survival of the first', i.e., if you're first in the game, you can out-wit better adapted individuals by sheer numbers. Although a new breed can produce more offspring, once this game is iterated, the advantage disappears after a few generations, and the status-quo is maintained.

So, essentially, nothing really trivial or tautological about 'survival of the fittest'. And going back to the article itself, it might be that the paper actually shows some circumstance in which survival of the fittest is untrue.

I'm pretty sure another two decades of bombing will show ISIS the errors of their ways and let them truly appreciate the love that the Western world has for the Middle-East.

If you've seen enough limbs flying around, a little fire seems like a kindness.

But of course, in reality, Greenplum nor Netezza would have developed commercial offerings on GPL based software. They would have chosen some other starting point, or, if no such point existed, would have built from scratch. So there would not have been any giving back.

Right now, Angela Merkel has a problem, because she guaranteed the German public that all the money that they lent to Greece would be eventually paid back.

Angela Merkel has a problem because she deceived the German public in order to save the German Landesbanken that owned most of the Greek debt. Instead of letting the banks go bankrupt, and thereby creating a political problem (these banks are state owned, and run by politicians), she created enough time for the banks to offload the debt to the EU public at large. In the German case: profits go to politicians, losses are socialized. Pretty Soviet.

If you want to really hurt your head, try implementing Ackermann's function using iteration. For a less theoretical example, try traversing a tree. It can be done using a stack and iteration, but the result is much more messy.

Globally, you're probably below the lowest 1%, as nobody in the developing world is allowed to rake up this much debt without being killed or going to prison. Interesting paradox of wealth.

struct TRTPHeader {
unsigned Version : 2;
unsigned Padding : 1;
unsigned Extension : 1;
unsigned CSRC_Count : 4;
...
unsigned Data : 8;
};

And now I can say packet.Version = 2. I can also see that 'padding' is not at the byte boundary, so that's probably a bug. So why is the Pascal version better?

I think that OO is possibly the worst thing that ever happened to computer science. Nice try, but it turns out that in practice, inheritance is a bad idea. Luckily C++ doesn't force one into OO like the more pure languages do. That's why I like C++.

Numbers are ordered. By construction.

The arithmetic mean is an average, as is the geometric mean, as is the median. Also, intelligence as measured by IQ tests actually is symmetric and non-skewed.