Global Warming is not, and should not be a partisan issue. Unfortunately, decades of Exxon Mobil propaganda[1][2] have brainwashed millions of people all over the world, which has caused this to become strongly politicized.
History will not look kindly upon them and those who towed that line of lies.
Edit: I fully agree with what you said, I just wanted to leave this here to shed some light on what is actually happening and why we’ve reached this point.
>We employed the method of mixing the order of questions, not giving question titles, and having a pool of subtly different questions (a negation or a different constant slipped in)
What an awful burden to put on the shoulders of the already overworked and underpaid professors.
I pay over $6,000 a semester to attend a reasonably-priced state university. While the professors may be overworked and underpaid, from a student perspective, for the money I give the institution, the institution can invest a little in systems that do all this automatically.
International students pay significantly more, and there are often 100 students or more in a class.
So it’s also not a great solution to put the burden of overworked professors onto the students by invading privacy and making them use poorly built suffrage to do so.
We did this through the exam software (Browser-Based). Everything not checked automatically (multiple choice) was sorted by question in the backend. We (the examiners) had all the information. It was just hidden from the students.
Might I ask, was the exam software you used something you acquired from a third-party, or was it something you built yourselves? Would you recommend it? I have been dissatisfied with everything we have tried so far in my organization, and what you used sounds pretty good.
I don’t know what you use for your LMS, but I know Canvas can do most of that as part of its Quiz system (randomize questions given, randomize constants and answers, etc). I’m sure Blackboard and moodle have something similar.
It's a whole platform for e-learning. The exam system is ... usable. The fine arts, law, and social silences like it very much, because long form answers are readable.
The natural sciences with the math bit have to work around it. We manage.
Glad that you had an automatic system going, but most universities don't have one and can't fund its development, and wanting to shift this burden to professors is unreasonable.
Your stance is that it’s unaffordable for a university to spend a small amount of money on randomized browser tests, therefore they should spend a large amount of money on intrusive spying software?
I don't believe a public institution would be able to come up with a system like this that works reasonably and have it developed in a reasonable amount of time within a reasonable budget.
> I don't believe a public institution would be able to come up with a system like this that works reasonably
I don't believe “e-proctoring” companies are capable of it, either. I got disqualified from an exam for five `onblur` events (while my screen was being recorded), and it kept counting while the “DO NOT CHEAT” lockout message was displayed; if that's “works reasonably” then I don't know what isn't.
In 2009 I developed a system like this as part of my course at the equivalent of a community college. The premise of the class was to develop a real world application employing the skills we had learned so far (project management, programming, etc). The whole class (10 people) participated in building this software.
We spent 6 months on it and as far as I heard was still in use as late as 2015.
You don't have to create a whole system; just a database that prepares variants of questions, and a method to put it into the existing exam software.
> ...and wanting to shift this burden to professors is unreasonable.
Why is it unreasonable? What level of duty do you perceive course instructors having to achieving positive outcomes for their students? Who is responsible for pushing improvements beyond the trough of the status quo?
"If this trend continues, by the end of the next century atmospheric CO2 would approach 900 ppm—just below levels during the Paleocene thermal extinction 54 million years ago."
That's my point. It won't continue. Nothing grows to infinity. CO2 levels are rising due to an increase in emissions year-over-year. This increase is guaranteed to stop on its own. We don't know what happens if emissions stabilize at current levels. Perhaps CO2 concentration will continue to rise for a while, perhaps it will stabilize rather quickly. Absent any other factors, the long term trend is always for CO2 levels to (slowly) sink.
If I naively extend the following correlation, just going from 420 to 520 would require adding another 30 Gt of CO2 of annual emissions (almost doubling current levels):
Same problem, you're name-dropping an extinction event which has, at best, a speculative relation to climate change in general and CO2 levels in particular. Certainly you will find such events where changes in CO2 coincide with extinction, but you will also find events where they don't.
> Lots of countries are looking to go from 1950's economy to modern standards, many live in rural areas that develop etc.
That is true and I'm not ruling it out, but that then begs the question what difference (if any) the comparably small population of already developed countries could make by curbing their emissions.
> Why do you believe CO2 tends to drop?
The cycles of the past million years. After every sudden peak, CO2 levels drop... until the next peak.
> The accumulated CO2 don't follow emission drops in the graph.
For one, there have been no sustained drops in emissions. Secondly, these graphs have different smoothing functions applied to them. Still, they do track each other pretty closely. Around the time of WW2, you see several years of constant CO2 levels, despite increasing cumulative emissions.
> Humanity is driving faster downhill without any brakes.
That's the mental image you like to use. I like to use this one:
Sequestration, basically. All of those fossil fuels we burn today have at one point not returned into the atmosphere. An increase in CO2 also leads to an increase in vegetation. Ocean acidification is a concern that I can't dismiss, but that's true of many concerns and I can't cater to them all.
> Those CO2 peaks mark descents into Ice Ages and cataclysmic events during millions of years.
I was referring to the interglacial cycles, these are not cataclysmic per se.
As for the descent into an ice age, according to the interglacial cycle, we were right on schedule for that. Perhaps our ancestors will thank us for averting it?
Webp is a format that Google pulled out of their ass and successfully pushed because of their market dominance; I don't see why Apple should help Google's hegemony.
Because it's unscientific fear mongering. There's plenty already around covid 19, it doesn't make people trust the experts so to speak more if such flimsy "evidence" are being thrown around.
If people cared about scientific this pandemic wouldn't take so many lives.
People care about fear. They by themselves come up with the dumbest possible fears. In absence of hope for reason I'd prefer they feared the thing that steers them in the life saving direction.
Don't you fear more the people that manufactured and spread fear that made people buy products that harm them and the environment? Or people that manufactured fear that made millions go to wars so somone else can benefit? Manufacturing fear is game people play all the time. With effects way worse than saving lives.
Besides, fearing something more than death is not very reasonable. Your life is the only thing you have. You'll never have anything else. And your death is the the thing that makes you loose it. It should be feared the most.
Of course it is. Not a single study has been done, not a single shred of evidence has been presented, it's lumped in as a possible symptom of the "long covid" baloney, the article itself even says that people might just be depressed after a year of lockdown or otherwise making it up.
Then of course there's the disgustingly obvious propaganda part at the end: "“Having vaccinations leads to having more sex,” he quipped. “I would suggest for young people to get their vaccinations: If they want to have sex, better to get the vaccine.”"
No. Should I? Is it the case that my machine is exposed without them, and creating them is necessary to solve the problem? Or that it's fine the way it is now, and creating them would cause the very problem I would be hoping to solve?
By way of verification, not only did I double check the path in regedit, but I also tried copy pasting the command line from the Microsoft page, and that gave path not found.
I don't understand your argument. Are the screenshots in that post faked? Because if they are not, they prove that those movements are Western influence...
