>> ^Jinx:

because ddos is hacking like crowding the entrance to a bank is a bank robbery.


Hacking is now an all inclusive term, it just means anything we don't approve of done with a computer. The news can't educate anyone, and the term keeps being used ad nauseam. Sometimes I get lectured by older people on the dangers of hacking, it's sad that they have know education on the subject yet they choose to inform others.

EDIT: By the way there is a documentary coming out about Anonymous and their effect on our society. It looks to me like it's full of itself, saying that Anon is now seriously influencing geopolitics. I don't see any changes brought about by Anon so I'm not really sure how the movie will present it's thesis. It seems to me that the world talks about Hackers with a sort of awe, and some of the hackers are buying into it.

>> ^Kofi:

She was clearly referring to the quasi-Rousseauian undertones of Obama's pre-election promises when compared to his autocratic yet Hegelian dialectic of historical materialism as demonstrated by his attempt to governmentalise the auto-industry.
This woman is clearly a first generation Frankfurt school type critical theorist as she quoted the now infamous Adorno and Hawkheimer work "Just study it out". Far from a derogatory phrase she is merely asking the American people to abandon their nationalistic self-destruction and embrace internationalism as entolled by Tolstoy and Lenin.
Kudos comrade.


...and shit.

She was clearly referring to the quasi-Rousseauian undertones of Obama's pre-election promises when compared to his autocratic yet Hegelian dialectic of historical materialism as demonstrated by his attempt to governmentalise the auto-industry.

This woman is clearly a first generation Frankfurt school type critical theorist as she quoted the now infamous Adorno and Hawkheimer work "Just study it out". Far from a derogatory phrase she is merely asking the American people to abandon their nationalistic self-destruction and embrace internationalism as entolled by Tolstoy and Lenin.

Kudos comrade.

*brief Short, but great.

This truly is one of the most amazing CME or Filament eruptions I've ever seen. I personally think this is, literally, the BEST I've witnessed. It's mesmerizing and AMAZING to watch... Truly an amazing dance of high energy Physics with extremely powerful forces of Physics also at play, making this little dance all come together; much like the beautiful loops of plasma formed over sunspots as the plasma flows from the negative flow sunspot it's positive brother. This flow between these two areas create magnificent loops of plasma above the Sun's surface sometimes stable for awhile until there is a magnetic reconnection, which in turn creates the stunning filament that was created in the southeastern area (which now has rotated towards us and is more central southern area) of the Sun and then shooting off into space in many directions. All thanks to NASA's SDO satellite that took this amazing video (and photos; there is also a FAR bigger array of things that the little satellite got: scientific readings at several time increments, photos in every energy frequency you want basically, same with video, and other assorted stuff--it REALLY IS the little satellite that CAN do, it has shown time and time again that NASA knew what they were doing when they made it and they have lived up to their reputation of exceeding the standard of excellence that is expected of them--JUST LIKE the now infamous Curiosity rover; GO NASA).

P.S.- This is off-topic, but here it goes anyway... There is a great need for us to overhaul our education system, there have been so many examples lately that show the need for more science/engineering students from/in the United Sates. Which right now just isn't happening. The U.S. superiority complex is losing to ITSELF, mostly thanks to idiotic Bible-thumping Republicans/Tea-Party members. Just look at what NASA has done in the last 10 years with the small and ridiculous budget they have--the same people that once put men on the Moon and created a HUGE amount of new devices (like the MRI, just for a quick example; there's a huge list somewhere--NASA happens to be one of the only government agencies that uses its money, files patents, and then the U.S. creates a consumer version that makes quite a bit of money...). NASA has a PERFECT Curiosity landing, a landing that was extremely complicated and...well, awesome. A team like that would make use of EVERY PENNY, better than a bank could. Sadly our government is delusional along with the citizens who almost believe sometimes that NASA should just be zeroed out. BUT, I think NASA of course deserves 20 or 30 times the money it receives. We, in HOW we treat our own REMARKABLE, admired, and talked of world wide Space Program, make ourselves look like the idiots we are (atleast the ones that deserve that statement). If Obama wants to do something interesting he should raise NASA's budget by quite a bit, as Mitt has made it clear that he plans to just raise the military's already bloated beyond definition ("We're a hyperpower...") budget and to possibly engage in two wars, plus a second and brand-new Cold War with Putin's Russia.

It's an emotionally-charged issue, so I know how easy it is for a discussion to devolve, especially on the Internet. I'd normally steer very clear of it, but somehow I feel like The Sift is a "safer" place to attempt a discourse, even knowing that my position is probably the contrary one in this community. Rarely have I come out of an ideological discussion on the Sift without having something new to consider, even if my overall position is unchanged.In reply to this comment by hpqp:
Hello! I just wanted to say that I appreciate the discussion you've launched (and by daringly agreeing with the infamous bk33 no less!), and would like to continue, but it will have to wait a bit because it is 2:30 am over here (CH) and I just spent the last hour wading through my comments looking for what I thought was a long debate on the subject (the Sift search seems not to be working), but so far I've only found this. I'll get back to you in a day, and I look forward to seeing how the discussions develops!

Hello! I just wanted to say that I appreciate the discussion you've launched (and by daringly agreeing with the infamous bk33 no less!), and would like to continue, but it will have to wait a bit because it is 2:30 am over here (CH) and I just spent the last hour wading through my comments looking for what I thought was a long debate on the subject (the Sift search seems not to be working), but so far I've only found this. I'll get back to you in a day, and I look forward to seeing how the discussions develops!

I remember this one time in the Tenderloin of SF I was at a corner store of the infamous sixth street. I was walking out of the store when a bummed out crack head came rushing around the corner. He hit my beer as he walked by, not on purpose but because he was fucked up. He yelled, "watch where you're fucking going!" And I yelled "YOU watch where YOU'RE FUCKING going". And then all of a sudden I had all of these fucking idiots coming out of the woodwork at me. So, I kept walking and they kept following.

I crossed the street and I don't remember what I said but one of the guys just came up to me and quickly arranged a razor blade to my neck. And I just kept saying "DO IT, DO IT, Let's see you do it!"

I'm not sure if that is the way to handle it but it freaked the guy out.

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Very well stated. The devil's bell (which it's called in Ecuador and which name I like more than the others) has strong mythology about it, but it is apparently so difficult to extract the Datura from it, that most people I talked to about it just sort of laughed me off. I've spent more than two months traveling in both Ecuador and Colombia, six of those weeks studying with a leading northern Andean ethnographer. When you're on the road, it's a lot of fun to talk about these kinds of extreme phenomena, but for the most part, it's touristy b.s. The plant is much more famous for the hallucinogenic tea that can be made from the flowers themselves, which is also fatal if prepared incorrectly. Btw, Datura is the same compound that produces the infamous Vodou zombies in Haiti, made famous by Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis's "The Serpent and the Rainbow."

Vice loves to sensationalize this kind of thing, and I'm frankly a little annoyed at the characterization of the current political atmosphere in Colombia. Even the U.S. State Department's travel.state.gov, which is notoriously over-sensitive, has only qualified warnings about the dangers of traveling in rural areas. Colombia is a lot safer than the introduction to this story has painted it. Total disservice to the country and culture that gave this journalist his story. But Vice likes to dirty it up to sell mags to hipsters.

Still, totally entertaining and somewhat informative. Nice find.>> ^legacy0100:

lol I don't know about this one. Vice reporters are often a bit naive at times...
Still this was very well Directed. Had great atmosphere and pacing. Very good.

ALEC is the nationwide conservative organization behind almost every single nationally-infamous state law since 2010. Arizona's SB1070? Check. All those anti-union bills that popped up in the midwest? Check. Personhood amendments? Check. Forced ultrasound bills? Check. Now it appears they're behind "Stand Your Ground" too.

But basically, remember how all this stuff seemed to be popping up literally everywhere the GOP took control of the state-level government in 2010? Turns out that wasn't a coincidence, it was (as the saying goes) enemy action.
>> ^Yogi:

Interesting I've never heard of ALEC...sounds like they need a bit more publicity. From a serious source instead of a talking cartoon gun.

joe arpaio had his authority to identify illegal immigrants stripped from him, is infamous for racial profiling, among other things, and is just an all around jackass. sounds like a subject matter expert on obamas birth certificate to me. fucking idiots

i wish i had known that years ago. however to use this spot the ghosts can not see you go in. description reads...

"So where is that infamous hiding spot on the arcade game pacman? Well, I'm gonna show ya in this video.

This hiding spot was NICE for the pacman fanatic back then because the ghosts will never touch you...ever!! Perfect for when you needed a bathroom break."

>> ^ChaosEngine:

>> ^bcglorf:

I'm not entirely a layman. I'm basing my opinion on searches through peer reviewed journals, ones like this. If you go and take a look, you'll find it is a pretty much bullet-proof decimation of the statistical methods used in the infamous hockey stick graph. It's not a run and gun hit job by hacks funded by big oil either. Mann's team that generated the original hockey stick graph already came to the same conclusion(with gentler wording) in their own most recent work.
Read Mann's article for yourself, he's one of the most vehement of those claiming the science is 'settled'. His most recent paper's calculations with different statistical methods though show that the earth was just as warm(or warmer) twice before in just the last 2k years.
The science that is settled is that the planet has been warming for the last long while. The science is settled that the planet has been warming over just the last 100 years that we've had instrumental record. The science is settled that mankind is inputting measurable and even significant levels of CO2 into the atmosphere. The science is settled that CO2 contributes to the greenhouse effect. The science is settled that CO2's overall contribution to the greenhouse effect is less between 5-15%, while water vapor accounts for 60-90%. Science is well agreed that the role of water vapor in long term climate change is very poorly understood.
I challenge anyone to dispute the above assessment of the current state of scientific understanding, as my searching of peer-reviewed journals shows the experts in each relevant field agreeing with the above statements. Putting those together doesn't exactly add up to 'time to panic'. The only smoking gun that every was considered was the hockey stick graph that appeared to show that the last 100 years of warming was abnormal and unusual. The evidence for it is being thrown out though, and the newly recalculated data, even by the original team, suddenly looks a lot less worrying and much more normal.

That's probably the first rebuttal to climate change I've ever read that doesn't spout nonsense and lies. Kudos to you.
Out of interest, you say you're "not entirely a layman". May I ask if that means you have studied climatology or simply that you read the papers?
As for water vapour, it's not really a "forcing agent", it's reactive. It's better explained here.


My background is computer science but that requires a strong math background as well. When doing any manner of computer simulation of a complex and unknown system, the purely theoretical models are rarely sane. The reason being you can't model the bare physics of a complex system, so you have to essentially estimate(fake) the macro effects and properties. You get good computer models by comparing the results to real data and iterating back and forth until your model starts doing a better job of reflecting reality. The big red flag for me with climate models is the really limited real world data available to compare models to. I don't models aren't worthwhile, scientists are building them because they are useful. The trouble is what they are useful for. By definition, the models have to be treated as less reliable than the raw data we calibrate them against and run our sanity checks against. Neither does it matter how many different models we run, all that gets is closer to the same reliability as the real world measures that we have.

That ties into the article I linked, where the climate guys trying to rebuild temperature data to calibrate computer models from where themselves not strong enough in statistics to notice very significant flaws in the methods they were using. Flaws that systematically produced the results they initially deemed significant. Without a strong grounding there, I have to assess we are still left with a long road to go before really saying we understand this.

As for water vapor being reactive, I would very much disagree. Any climate scientist trying to tell you that is trying to simplify things for you to the point they are no longer being accurate. Ice caps melting, oceans rising, and cloud cover doubling is going to drive climate. It is going to force climate more strongly than anything else. The big unknown is just what parameters water vapor works under, it's simply not well understood yet. Computer models don't even know what sign to assign it as a forcing agent for pitysake. Most likely because it can act as both positive and negative based on environmental factors which are dependent on temperature among other things. When it comes to what kind of forcing H2O does the honest answer is that it's role is so complicated we just simply do not know. What we DO know is that currently, it contributes to 60-90% of the overall greenhouse effect. That tells me it's role in forcing is a much more worthy area of focus and study than CO2 and it's a crying shame so many more dollars are spent on CO2 than H2O when what we really need is to understand the whole system in order know what is really going on.

>> ^bcglorf:


I'm not entirely a layman. I'm basing my opinion on searches through peer reviewed journals, ones like this. If you go and take a look, you'll find it is a pretty much bullet-proof decimation of the statistical methods used in the infamous hockey stick graph. It's not a run and gun hit job by hacks funded by big oil either. Mann's team that generated the original hockey stick graph already came to the same conclusion(with gentler wording) in their own most recent work.
Read Mann's article for yourself, he's one of the most vehement of those claiming the science is 'settled'. His most recent paper's calculations with different statistical methods though show that the earth was just as warm(or warmer) twice before in just the last 2k years.
The science that is settled is that the planet has been warming for the last long while. The science is settled that the planet has been warming over just the last 100 years that we've had instrumental record. The science is settled that mankind is inputting measurable and even significant levels of CO2 into the atmosphere. The science is settled that CO2 contributes to the greenhouse effect. The science is settled that CO2's overall contribution to the greenhouse effect is less between 5-15%, while water vapor accounts for 60-90%. Science is well agreed that the role of water vapor in long term climate change is very poorly understood.
I challenge anyone to dispute the above assessment of the current state of scientific understanding, as my searching of peer-reviewed journals shows the experts in each relevant field agreeing with the above statements. Putting those together doesn't exactly add up to 'time to panic'. The only smoking gun that every was considered was the hockey stick graph that appeared to show that the last 100 years of warming was abnormal and unusual. The evidence for it is being thrown out though, and the newly recalculated data, even by the original team, suddenly looks a lot less worrying and much more normal.


That's probably the first rebuttal to climate change I've ever read that doesn't spout nonsense and lies. Kudos to you.

Out of interest, you say you're "not entirely a layman". May I ask if that means you have studied climatology or simply that you read the papers?

As for water vapour, it's not really a "forcing agent", it's reactive. It's better explained here.

>> ^NetRunner:

@therealblankman directly measured temperature data has been around since the 1880's. Nasa's just compiled that data into a graphical video for mass consumption.
@visionep, @bcglorf here's a link to the scientific paper associated with the video: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110415_EnergyImba
lancePaper.pdf
But it's not as if the questions you raise haven't been answered a million times over, and it's not as if coal and oil companies haven't spent billions trying to discredit the findings for almost two decades, without success.
Maybe, just maybe, you guys should give the benefit of the doubt to the people who've dedicated their lives to studying this stuff, and not assume that they've made some basic error that any layman can see?


I'm not entirely a layman. I'm basing my opinion on searches through peer reviewed journals, ones like this. If you go and take a look, you'll find it is a pretty much bullet-proof decimation of the statistical methods used in the infamous hockey stick graph. It's not a run and gun hit job by hacks funded by big oil either. Mann's team that generated the original hockey stick graph already came to the same conclusion(with gentler wording) in their own most recent work.

Read Mann's article for yourself, he's one of the most vehement of those claiming the science is 'settled'. His most recent paper's calculations with different statistical methods though show that the earth was just as warm(or warmer) twice before in just the last 2k years.

The science that is settled is that the planet has been warming for the last long while. The science is settled that the planet has been warming over just the last 100 years that we've had instrumental record. The science is settled that mankind is inputting measurable and even significant levels of CO2 into the atmosphere. The science is settled that CO2 contributes to the greenhouse effect. The science is settled that CO2's overall contribution to the greenhouse effect is less between 5-15%, while water vapor accounts for 60-90%. Science is well agreed that the role of water vapor in long term climate change is very poorly understood.

I challenge anyone to dispute the above assessment of the current state of scientific understanding, as my searching of peer-reviewed journals shows the experts in each relevant field agreeing with the above statements. Putting those together doesn't exactly add up to 'time to panic'. The only smoking gun that every was considered was the hockey stick graph that appeared to show that the last 100 years of warming was abnormal and unusual. The evidence for it is being thrown out though, and the newly recalculated data, even by the original team, suddenly looks a lot less worrying and much more normal.