Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:What a load of crap (Score 2) 696

"I just witnessed a murder!"

"Who cares? Murders happen every day. It shouldn't surprise anyone that there are murders in this country."

"But isn't it your obligation to take down in the evidence I have in order to help catch the criminal?"

"Not my problem. Come back when you have a juicy crime to report. Something exciting, and maybe titillating, like a rape charge or a kidnapped showgirl. Then we might do something about it."

Comment Re:"Stand up for the cause"? (Score 4, Informative) 267

Releasing a stream of illegally-released classified information from a democratic nation?

Your poor wording aside, it is not illegal to publish classified documents as decided by the Supreme Court in New York Times Co v United States. Leaking classified documents is only a crime for government employees.

Too bad people can't see this for what it is: a foreign national releasing illegally-obtained classified information in a coordinated effort to deliberately try to influence public opinion and US policy.

Other than your claim that Assange obtained the documents illegally, which I just showed to be a complete lie, that description applies equally well to Rupert Murdoch, but I don't see you calling for his arrest.

not the government that works on behalf of the people

If you had bothered to read even a fraction of what Wikileaks put out you wouldn't be so ignorant as to make the claim that the US government works "on behalf of the people".

It results in an environment where closed and repressive societies have an advantage in the information realm over open and democratic societies.

Did it even occur to you that you just spent your entire post attacking someone who has done nothing illegal and arguing that the media should shut up and only publish whatever information the government decides they should? Sounds like you would enjoy living in a closed and repressive society to me.

Comment Re:The Kalam Argument - Epic Win (Score 1) 631

1) Time cannot have started an infinite amount of time ago, because adding a finite amount of time to a negative inifnity will never result in the present day.
2) Therefore the universe cannot be infinitely old
3) Therefore it had a starting moment
4) Therefore it is more likely it was created than not.

Sadly, this isn't even valid. At least the modern, three-premise version of the argument (as defended by William Lane Craig) has that going for it. However, something like this is appropriated by Craig as justification for his second premise. Unfortunately, his arguments for the impossibility of an "actual infinite" fail just as badly.

Comment Re:Pot/Kettle (Score 2, Insightful) 701

I was responding to a post about the review's conclusions, not the scientific validity of the proxies, so obviously I didn't respond to McKitrick's claims. Don't insult me because I'm not discussing the topic that you so desperately want to debate. Start a new post if you can't stay on topic.

"If they were intentionally misleading the public, why would they omit the data from a later publication with much wider circulation?"

A report for the WMO has a wider circulation than NATURE, arguably the most prestigious science journal in the world? Are you kidding me?

The later publication contains all the information necessary to find the original articles. Anyone who actually deserves the label 'skeptic', instead of 'blind-faith conspiracy theorist' would have looked up the original articles by Mann and other to see how the proxy data was used to make the graph. Are you actually arguing a cover-up of data that is publicly available in the most prestigious journal in science? What kind of cover-up involves covering up material that is already in the public domain? If people like McKitrick are too damn lazy to check sources that's a mark against them.

Comment Re:not cleared (Score 3, Informative) 701

"Intentionally supplying misleading figures is scientific misconduct"

Yes, it is. Except the report did not claim anywhere that it was intentional. Nor was it, considering that the dropping of tree ring data was made explicit in the original paper where the graph was used:

In one of the most notorious leaked e-mails, Jones, referring to the WMO report graph, described how he had "just completed Mike's trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years". Jones was referring to the fact that climatologist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University in University Park had used direct temperature measurements to reconstruct temperatures over the past 20 years or so in a graph in an earlier Nature paper [2]. However, while Mann and his colleagues had clearly labelled which temperature lines were derived from direct measurements and which referred to proxy data, the graph submitted by Jones for the WMO report did not.
- UK climate data were not tampered with

If they were intentionally misleading the public, why had the same graph already been published with the missing information?

"What does bother me is the attempt to pass off the results of incompetent software engineering as valid science."

The evidence of your post tells me that the misrepresentation of facts doesn't seem to bother you at all.

Comment Re:The island was not purgatory! (Score 1) 4

One unanswered question for me is "who was the Smoke Monster"? Jacob's brother doesn't fit- for the SM was obviously on the island in Egyptian times (from the hieroglyphs on the wall of the temple) but Jacob's biological mother arrived in Roman times (from the use of Latin as a common language).

Well, I think it's certainly plausible that, although Jacob's brother was the smoke monster we saw active on the island, he wasn't the *only* smoke monster that has ever existed on the island. There were people on the island before Jacob/MiB ever got there. Doesn't seem too much of a stretch to imagine that the MiB wasn't the first guy to get tossed down the golden-hole (indeed, the skeletons we see down there attest to that).

Comment Re:First Thought (Score 2, Insightful) 148

People should only be taxed for what they use, when I buy an online good for physical money what service of the government am I using? I use paypal which is a private company to use my private credit card on a private site to get something online which go through the privately owned internet lines which I pay for out of my own pocket, to another privately owned server where I play my game.

That's all well and good, I suppose. But when you pay money for an online good and the seller reneges on the deal to deliver, just don't come crying to the government-run courts or police, okay?

Comment Re:Good Fix... (Score 1) 460

Remember also that every trade on the market which is not directly linked to the true value of a stock actively destroys information because it introduces noise into the market, polluting the use of that stock's trading symbol as a measure of real wealth (rather than imaginary fantasy wealth).

(Emphasis mine)

What exactly is the "true value of the stock"? If your answer has anything to do with the future (future revenue, future earnings, etc.), please explain how you're able to know the "true value" of anything which has yet to happen.

Comment Radialpoint Security Suite (Powered by BitDefender (Score 1) 896

Radialpoint actually provides a really good security suite (Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware, Parental Control + loads of other features) for free through its "user community" program: http://radialpoint.net/home/

This is the same security software that ISPs like Verizon, Rogers, Bell Canada, Virgin, etc... charge their customers anywhere from 8$-12$ a month to use.They give away a limited number of copies for free in order to collect crash data and improve the product that's ultimately delivered to ISPs, kind of like a perpetual beta test. The software itself is powered by the latest BitDefender engine for real-time, on-demand and scheduled scanning. It also lets you use WebSense to do parental controls.

They even have a Mac version that's freely available through their site. Check it out!

Slashdot Top Deals

"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."

Working...