Posts by Thought About IT 433 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Feb 2008
"The last 3 major releases of IE (9, 10, 11) have all been faster than the current version of Chrome at the time on the SunSpider JavaScript performance test..."
Here are the scores for the Octane benchmark on my 64-bit Windows 7 PC:
IE 11: 7,400
FF 32: 12,400
Chrome 38: 14,300
The V8 JavaScript engine makes Chrome nearly twice as fast as IE, but I'll stick with FF as I don't consider that to be spyware.
"I am going to take a shot in the dark here and assume they mean Windows for tablets and phones."
GoPro do have an app for Windows Phone:
http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/gopro/bca90c60-10c7-4009-b8b0-13df4ebcf9da
Haven't tried it so don't know if it's any good.
"Google’s chairman, Eric Schmidt, told National Public Radio that the company had joined Alec, a lobby group that shares model legislation, for a campaign on an unrelated issue." Source.
This bears frequent repetition:
“The facts of climate change are not in question anymore. Everyone understands climate change is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place. And so we should not be aligned with such people — they’re just, they’re just literally lying.”
According to the OED, a denier is "one who denies" something. They cite a few examples of its usage, the first dating from c1475, none of which mention the Holocaust. Of course, AGW deniers have tried strenuously to make that association, in an attempt to discredit the use of such an apposite term against them. Well, if the cap fits ...
"Then why do you insist on portraying anyone who questions the 'settled science' as such [sociopaths]? They're not all toadies owned by big oil."
Because, given a clear risk to the stable climate which sustains us all, you'd have to be a sociopath to think that your political ideology is more important.
"you'll have to take into account the fact that those working in climate 'science' have a massively vested interest in not de-railing the funding bandwagon"
Did you ever consider that their "massive vested interest" might simply be to warn us that we are behaving like lemmings walking towards a cliff, because we'll take them with us, if we don't alter course?
We're not all sociopaths.
Just two climate committee MPs clash with IPCC - and at least one of them has a clear conflict of interest:
"Tethys Petroleum (TSE:TPL) (LON:TPL) announced Wednesday that its vice chairman, Peter Lilley, has been appointed as the co-chairman of the Uzbek-British Trade & Industry Council (UBTIC).
"I am very pleased that Peter has been appointed to this position which is instrumental in developing commercial and business relations between Britain and Uzbekistan,” said Tethys’ chairman, president and CEO, Dr. David Robson."
From proactiveinvestors.com.
"The question then becomes - why do so many people who have not critically analysed the data with a trained and experienced eye decide that those who have are wrong?"
There's a good research paper on this here, by Stephan Lewandowsky et al from the University of Western Australia. It was originally published in Frontiers of Psychology, but they withdrew it when some of the anti-AGW propagandists cited in it threatened to sue. The University stands by the research and now hosts the paper online.
In summary: "much of science denial takes place in an epistemically closed system that is immune to falsifying evidence and counterarguments".
· CO2 is a greenhouse gas the effect of which increases with its concentration in the atmosphere.
· The concentration of CO2 has increased from about 315ppm to 400ppm in the past 50 years.
· This has resulted in less heat being returned to space, ergo the planet is warming up.
I regard this stuff as very basic physics. What about you, Squander Two?
"the average global temperature has not risen in seventeen years"
You can't have been paying attention when you were briefed with which memes to concentrate on in the build-up to the release of this IPCC report. Even ignoring the fact that the heat is not just going into the atmosphere, globally, the hottest 12-month period ever recorded was from June 2009 to May 2010.
"If these guys (or any of the other climate change bods) wants our attention - or even more: for someone, somewhere to actually DO something, they need much more than wishy-washy risks and dangers. They need numbers, dates, times and places. Who will die - specifically - their names please, when and what will the photos look like on the news reports. Who will have to pay. Which wars will break out and how much civil unrest will there be - and in which towns - and did they for for our party."
Therein lies the success of the propagandists denying AGW. They keep upping their demands for proof as the proof gets every more undeniable. I doubt they'd concede, even if they were having to paddle through floods to their charitable foundations and think tanks.
Judging by the comments here and elsewhere, it's clearly unsettling for those with a certain agenda that major corporations are publicly accepting that global warming is a serious concern and are prepared to put their money where their mouths are. The CEO of Apple even told investors complaining about their policy of building and using renewable sources of energy that it was the right thing to do, and they should sell their stock-holding if they didn't like it. It would be far more sensible to get out of fossil fuels, because those corporations are going to have to leave much of their products in the ground.
"Our findings reveal that Pine Island Glacier has experienced rapid thinning at least once in the past, and that, once set in motion, rapid ice sheet changes in this region can persist for centuries."
Good to have Lewis, with his deep understanding of climate science, reassure us that we haven't triggered an irreversible change that will result in sea levels rising by metres from all that melting ice.
A couple of Lenovo PCs I bought recently to replace XP came with Windows 7 installed and Windows 8 on DVDs. Having tried Windows 8.1 with ClassicShell and seeing it was similar enough to using Windows 7, I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade the Lenovos. The process of installing Win 8 from Lenovo's DVDs, then using Windows Update to go to Win 8.1 took about 3 hours for each PC! However, the users, who've been on XP for years, have said they much prefer the new environment, so I'm glad I did it.
I'm still trying to understand why Edward Snowden was employed by Dell while he was working for the NSA, according to the Guardian ( http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/01/edward-snowden-intelligence-leak-nsa-contractor-extract ). This raises questions as to how closely Dell is working with the NSA.
"The question may arise as to whether government clients may push back on having Chinese Lenovo kits in their data centres due to "national security" concerns."
That thought crossed my mind, before purchasing some Lenovo PCs and ThinkPads, but I dismissed it with the thought that if any back doors were discovered in their hardware they would be toast, so are unlikely to risk it.
Well, the sensible approach would be to accept that what the overwhelming majority of climatologists are saying is right, then have a political debate about how to tackle it. The stupid approach is to deny the science because its implications are financially, politically and socially inconvenient.
You'd have to come from Mars not to realise that clinging to orthodoxy is the essence of the problem that Snowden has unearthed. The intelligensia of East Germany didn't defeat the Stasi, because they could never create a mass movement from people who spied on each other. It might turn individual dissenters into terrorists (which would be twisted to legitimise the surveillance), but how on earth could opposition to an overbearing state grow under such intense monitoring?
Thanks for the heads-up about that interview . Dr. Campbell makes a powerful, if obvious point, which is unfortunately irrelevant. No amount of scientific proof will convince politicians to take action while the AGW denial propaganda continues to make it a vote loser. As the stock market valuation of fossil fuel companies is based on their known reserves, and the science implies that most of those reserves must be left in the ground, the propaganda isn't going to let up any time soon. We're easy prey to it because, like Dr. Campbell, we don't want it to be true.
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