"A US government-funded survey has found that Americans with higher levels of scientific and mathematical knowledge are more sceptical regarding the dangers of climate change than their more poorly educated fellow citizens."

That is an expected result since at the heart of the scientific method is being skeptical. So those that are more skeptical of unsubstantiated and wild claims of impending Co2 Climate Doomsday Rapture are actually following the scientific method much better than those that merely believe the science just because a scientist makes a claim.

"The results of the survey are especially remarkable as it was plainly not intended to show any such thing: Rather, the researchers and trick-cyclists who carried it out were doing so from the position that the "scientific consensus" (carbon-driven global warming is ongoing and extremely dangerous) is a settled fact, and the priority is now to find some way of getting US voters to believe in the need for urgent, immediate and massive action to reduce CO2 emissions."

Then the people who conducted the study don't actually comprehend the principles of science nor the scientific method but instead where looking for a political outcome as evidenced by their use of the notion of "consensus".

“We’ve learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.” – Richard Feynman, Cargo Cult Science

“No theory is carved in stone. Science is merciless when it comes to testing all theories over and over, at any time, in any place. Unlike religion or politics, science is ultimately decided by experiments, done repeatedly in every form. There are no sacred cows. In science, 100 authorities count for nothing. Experiment counts for everything.” – Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at City College of New York

“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” – Ernest Rutherford

“if your prediction is wrong then your hypothesis is wrong. Period. – Richard Feynman

As Mother Nature isn't obeying the AGW's supporters claims of CO2 Climate Doomsday Rapture by not warming these past twelve years the hypothesis of AGW has been falsified in the objective reality of Nature.

In any event, it's nice to see that even in this study the scientific method tends to prevail over the preconceived confirmation bias of those involved.

"is polluting the air good for you or not? The answer is obviously, no,"

Open a biology text book once in a while, you'll find that CO2 is not a pollutant, it is an essential nutrient for plant life.

Reminds me of the variable combustion chamber geometry engines that were a fad back in the early '90s. With electronic control it is possible to run a gasoline engine mostly on single event pre-detonation (which used to be called "pinking") which allowing things to get completely out of control and creating the damaging pre-detonation commonly called "knocking".

In the cloud, of course.

GCC itself.

"The development of a new front-end was started out of a need -- a need for a compiler that allows better diagnostics, better integration with IDEs, a license that is compatible with commercial products, and a nimble compiler that is easy to develop and maintain. All of these were motivations for starting work on a new front-end that could meet these needs."
http://clang.llvm.org/

Reality is not a wave function. It's a useful model, but it's absurd to think of it as real and physical.

The cat isn't really both alive and dead. It's either still alive or it died. It certainly knows.

Reality is reality and models are models.

Except that now we are finding the cat is both dead and alive. The question is, which universe do you inhabit? The only way for you to find out is to measure the result, collapse the probability, and determine which reality you inhabit. Your copy (the one you're so desparate to believe doesn't exist, perhaps because s/he threatens your sense of uniqueness, or free will, or whatever), if s/he opens the box and looks, will find s/he inhabits a universe with a different outcome.

As for self determination and uniqueness, this need not really trouble people. In an infinite set of universes, any outcome will be statistical in nature. Like predicting which atom will decay during the half-life of a radioactive material, no prediction can be made as to a particular state (or decision) you or I, as individuals in an indivual timeline, will make. We are still perfectly free to make decisions, and perfectly responisble for their outcomes, regardless of whether the decision we make matches that of 90% of our duplicates, or 0.0001%.

We may not be unique, but that doesn't mean we don't have free will. (Of course, we may not, but that doesn't follow from quantum physics, repetition in an infinite set, or any of the other variations of parallelism that appear more and more to be a fundamental property of our reality).

So people just need to chill, and see where the math and science actually take us. If it turns out we do inhabit a single, unqiue universe, then we get our uniqueness back and those bothered by parallelism are in luck (though it will be a short lived relief, geologically speaking, and ultimately fatal, astrophysically speaking). If it turns out otherwise, then so what? We still live our lives, with or without determinism. Whether we debate that in the context of a single unique timeline, or multiple, perhaps infinite timelines, doesn't really matter.

The only real loser is religion, whic presupposes just the one timeline. But then, religion has a long history of losing out to science and changing its teachings accordingly (like cockroaches, the memes don't die, they just adapt), so even that is unlikely to change if or when the multi-world hypothesis is proven.

So even the most dogmatic mind need not be threatened by either outcome...except perhaps for someone like the character in Star Trek, who is driven mad at the thought of another person in another universe just like them and spends eternity trying to hunt down and kill his duplicate. In which case, if reality is other than what they desire, tough shit.

Fuck that. If the populace keeps electing people who pass these laws, then representative democracy is working as it should. You don't withdraw your support from a government by "resisting". You lawfully withdraw your support from a government by expatriating (paying any required exit taxes on your way out the door), and denying it the revenue stream from your future taxes.

The US has a very effective financial Berlin wall built around the country. American Citizens and Permanent Residents (Green Card holders) are taxed on the basis of their citizenship/residency, irrespective of where they live. Want to renounce your citizenship? Fine. You'll still be taxed for an additional 10 years.

Good luck "sticking it to the man" through emigration.

It's GPLed, anyone can fork it. The trick is to get a critical mass of users and constributers to buy into your fork.

Take for example my fork of the GIMP, entitled QuitYourPurileBitchingAboutCallingTheGimpTheGimp. Exactly the same feature set as the Gimp, and it's even launchable via a shorthand symlink "QuitYourBitching".

Not much uptake, though.

Interesting that computer "the format of data files" are not copyrightable!

"the Court holds that neither the functionality of a computer program nor the programming language and the format of data files used in a computer program in order to exploit certain of its functions constitute a form of expression. Accordingly, they do not enjoy copyright protection."

Very interesting.