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Comment Re:Why so much resistance to climate science? (Score 1) 869

Well before you brand me "denier" let me say I am very much pro-environment. I think we should have negligible impact on the biosphere because who knows how long we will need this one.

Now, there is no such thing as "climate science", but there is "climate" and "science" and even "science applied to climate" however none of these are climate science. We know CO2 is a greenhouse gas and warms faster than our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere. And adding CO2 to that atmosphere will make it hotter. We've predicted that, and we can show in a lab experiment that is true. However that's where the science really ends. We have other ways that science is applied to climate, as in the study of ice cores and weather. But add these all up and you still can't call it "climate science" because we cannot (yet) account for everything going on. We cannot make a prediction and test it. First be have a sample set of one. It won't necessarily generalize. Second, the one we have is ours, and far too important to try any large scale experiment on. Third, its too big to try any sufficiently large experiment on.

So all we have is the ability to do is predict, wait, and measure. When we do that, we get wrong answers. Despite this "99% confidence" every single global warming alarmist has been wrong for the past 18 years. The increase between actual and prediction continues to grow. To me this is the single most important deciding factor. And I don't think it is to much to ask - that theory (models) match the actual. Over the last 17 years 8 months, not even the sign is the same. Actual is down a trivial amount (hundredths of a degree), but the models are saying 0.3 degree increase, with increased divergence expected. The fact that we can't predict a 20 year pause (even drop) is a big fucking deal. The humans have declared "the science settled" but despite that nature continues to do what it wants. So if you have all these "experts" saying "the science is settled" and nature is going the other way, who do you believe? Especially when they have these "99%" confidence intervals.

The truth of the matter is, only the science in the laboratory is settled. The science of what actually in the atmosphere is far from complete. I wouldn't be so "anti climate science" if these guys had a bit more modestly and a lot less hubris. But here's what they are doing. Their model predictions get more invalidated by the day, and how do they respond? "We have a 99% condience"... they double down on science that isn't working. They are in effect, becoming oracles or prophets of doom. A proper scientific response would be to retreat, revise the models until they have something that works, then apologize and start using the improved model. But that's not what these guys do. They spend way too much time making dire predictions (which don't validate) in the media.

I love science through and through, but I would be ashamed to call myself a climate scientist.

Comment Re:Human beings are not born with smartphone attac (Score 2) 184

Google's self-driving cars have gone 300,000 miles without an accident. That's somewhere in the neighborhood of 30–42 average-teen-driver-years worth of driving. Statistically, about 1 in five teenagers reports having an accident in any given year. So we would expect that the same number of miles driven by teenagers would have resulted in, on average, 6–8 accidents—more if we're talking about teenagers in their first year of driving.

In other words, Google's self-driving cars are already at least an order of magnitude safer than teen drivers. That's probably a statistically significant difference.

Comment Re:Not so fast, cowboy ... (Score 0) 723

In order for the "tax" to be sustained, it had to
1) be a tax. Obama pledged no new taxes on the middle class.
2) is a tax on the "privilege" of "going without" health insurance. Now, we started this nation over a 3% tax on tea. Now we have a tax on "going without"? The Constitution died that day, because if they tax the absence of something, they can of course tax the presence of something. This rendering all the taxing provisions of the Constitution irrelevant.

Comment How the numbers were acheived (Score 1) 723

1. A lot of late signups. - People waiting for the individual mandate being delayed.
2. Cancelled plans. Remember "if you like your plan, you can keep it" except you can't. All those people who lost their plan were insured are now uninsured and that greatly enlarged the number of people seeking. So you can't compare before and after numbers.
3. Some companies dropped plans entirely and let their employees get their own. My company was on the verge of doing that but elected not to at the last minute.
4. The combined numbers of 2 and 3 is estimated at 6 million. So backing that out, we only got aout 1 million more insured. Which is important, but not anything to brag about.
5. I'm not entirely convinced that the 7.1M number is actual people being insured. Maybe that many logins were created but a login is not insurance.

Comment As a Linux Mint proponent, I say no. (Score 1) 452

I run Mint at work and at home, and my retired neighbor runs it because of me.

However I continually run into limitations from it just not being windows. Unless all they do is web work, I foresee a need for them to run something micrrosoft.

Best to install SpiceWorks and see what you've got installed across your domain.

Comment Why are build envelopes so small? (Score 2) 69

Many of the things I want to build with a 3D printer are not complicated but are outside the build envelope of the printers out there. Like my truck grill which is about 48" wide, 12" tall and 3" deep.

Why don't we have bigger print envelopes? This should just be a matter of more steps of the stepper motor.

Comment HBase (Score 2) 272

First. everyone who is pointing out your premature optimization is probably right. You can get a lot of scalability out of existing databases, particularly if you optimize your data schema with indexes. Even if you store all possible 9,999,999,999 phone numbers, the log base-2 of that is 34. So you'll need a b-tree 34 levels deep. That's big, real big, but b-trees are fast. Worst case you are reading 34 blocks from disk, which is ~16kB.

Next, don't choose databases by name. Choose them by their features because you use features, not names. That said, HBase is probably what you want. It's a blend of distributable hadoop and tables. You don't need atomicity (it doesn't sound like) which is one thing you give up when leaving SQL behind.

Comment Re:Old news (Score 2) 144

You missed one major technical rule: all browsers on iOS that support local rendering are required to use the system rendering engine.

Actually, no, I'm pretty sure they're just not allowed to use any JavaScript engine other than the built-in JavaScriptCore. And as of iOS 7, it's theoretically possible to actually do so without using WebKit.

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