Slashdot Mirror

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook

Facebook's most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of Greylock's senior partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman of the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What's In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA.

If the USA has ~60 Fusion centres and a few ~100 trained IT cyber staff per centre, how many long term top quality "10 separate identities" can they deploy?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218177/Google_vs._Facebook_by_the_numbers
Say 150 million as a round max US user count with some very basic web 2.0 usage.
Add in airforce, NSA (and friends) via cyber efforts - 10 to x0 sites/bases, a few 100 staff/contractors with the same "10 separate identities"?
How many fake identities for 150 million US users?
Does the math get near the magic 2.5% of East Germany's Stasi ratio to "user" population?

Read more. I know we are capable of.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/27/crime-smuggling-alcohol-tobacco

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/648986/posts

http://www.atf.gov/alcohol-tobacco/

ExxonMobil continuing to fund climate sceptic groups, records show "ExxonMobil gave hundreds of thousands of pounds to lobby groups that have published 'misleading and inaccurate information' about climate change."

And that article is just the tip of the iceberg. There's also Exxon's funding of the infamous Heartland Institute, a "libertarian" anti-science denial shop. Heartland used to deny smoking caused cancer but unsurprisingly switched to denying global warming when their sponsorship changed. Exxon used to fund Heartland directly, but now funds them indirectly through conservative groups like the Scaife and Olin foundations.

It's hard for me to imagine how an educated person in 2011 could have ever been ignorant of how oil companies fund global warming denialism, but now there's no excuse.

Video footage has emerged of a police officer beating an Iraq war veteran so hard that he suffered a ruptured spleen in an apparently unprovoked incident at a recent Occupy protest in California.
The footage, which has been shared with the Guardian, shows Kayvan Sabehgi standing in front of a police line on the night of Occupy Oakland's general strike on 2 November, when he is set upon by an officer.
He does not appear to be posing any threat, nor does he attempt to resist, yet he is hit numerous times by an officer clad in riot gear who appears determined to beat him to the ground.
Sabehgi, 32, an Oakland resident and former marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, has since undergone surgery on his spleen. He says it took hours for him to be taken to hospital, despite complaining of severe pain. Police have told the Guardian they are investigating the incident.
The footage was recorded by artist and photographer Neil Rivas, who said Sabehgi was "completely peaceful" before he was beaten. "It was uncalled for," said Rivas. "There were no curse words. He was telling them he was a war vet, a resident of Oakland, a business owner."
Sabehgi has previously said he was talking to officers in a non-violent manner prior to his arrest, which the footage appears to confirm.
The 32-year-old can be seen standing in front of a line of police officers, all of whom are in riot gear. The officers walk forward, chanting and thrusting their batons, and Sabehgi starts to walk backwards.
Although the video is dark, an officer can clearly be seen beginning to hit Sabehgi around the legs with a baton, then starting to strike him higher up.

On top of that, as someone living in the UK, I'm not "allowed" to watch any of the extended interviews from TDS because the show airs a "Global Edition" here (which is basically a clip show) once a week on a cable TV network I don't have.

Of course it's trivial to get around the "blocking", but that's besides the point. As a result I just download the episodes from the internets after they air and catch up with additional material when I get the time.

As Cory Doctorow wrote today in the Guardian, if you don't provide people with a timely, straightforward, legitimate method to access your products, they'll find their own way to get hold of it and you won't get any money out of it.

The Republicans were never going to agree to anything.

Oh but they did agree to something, they agreed to go into the discussion AFTER signing the "Taxpayer Protection Pledge": http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/21/grover-norquist-tax-lobbyist-supercommittee-gop
They really set themselves up for success on that one.
"I know, lets go into a discussion about the US finances, but before we do, let's remove some of the most powerful tools in our toolbox completely"

I'm a european working for an American company, and have always been impressed with how American companies do business, their aggressive plans and the "everything is up for grabs" mentality. Lately however, I've been equally unimpressed by the opposite, here we are, facing a massive problem, and the American politicians are behaving like babies.
The response? Smoke weed on wall-street!

I would also suggest using webDAV at home or setup remotely, and configure your calendar, contacts, bookmarks and other file-syncing that way (of course encrypting everything before it hits the wire).

Additionally, in September RMS wrote a great piece on Android that might be of interest to you. Also, this little nugget from Firefox developers doing a pseudo-Q/A on Reddit (i know, i'm sorry) regarding your privacy in the browser might also be of concern to you.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/jul/16/harrypotter.jkjoannekathleenrowling

Sorry, this is the correct link that should have been posted.

Here's the UN report. It should be pointed out that the UN investigator had to make this report without unmonitored access to Manning because the US government refused 'unfettered' access, which is what the UN expects of all cooperating states.

Here's a Welsh MP expressing her concern about Manning's treatment, particularly relevant because Manning is apparently a Welsh citizen in addition to being a US citizen.

Here's Amnesty International.

If you haven't noticed that there's at least a serious question regarding whether Manning's been tortured, you've probably been limiting yourself to mainstream US media.

The Guardian article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2011/nov/18/1 provides much more depth and debunks this "EU daft ruling". This link provides a much more revealing article.

Aside from all the apologizing for the EU, the only real bit of extra information it provides is that this wasn't from the bottled water producers but a test case (troll?) from a couple of professors. From the article:

Firstly, "regular consumption" of water doesn't reduce the risk of dehydration any more than eating a pork pie a day reduces the risk of starvation.

True but vacuous; eating a pork pie a day does reduce the risk of starvation.

If I drink half a pint of bottled water while running through a desert in the blistering sun, I'll still end up dehydrated, and if I drink several bottles today, that won't prevent me from dehydrating tomorrow.

True but irrelevant; the claim doesn't indicate these are true. By analogy: you can take an aspirin a day but if you smoke like a chimney and eat nothing but saturated fat, you're still at elevated risk of a heart attack. And if you stop taking the aspirin, the protective effect disappears.

Secondly, dehydration doesn't just mean a lack of water, or 'being thirsty'; electrolytes like sodium are important too.

No, I'm sorry, dehydration does in fact mean a lack of water. Being low on sodium while having plenty of water is a different condition, hyponatremia.

long time, increasingly frustrated, reader, first time poster

Seriously, Slashdot? Have we gone that low in publishing standards?

The Guardian never wrote such things, contrary to what TFA sneakily implies in its byline (while linking to The Telegraph: a rag notorious for its vociferous anti-EU stance).
In fact, the Guardian wrote the exact opposite:

The EU has not said that water isn't healthy, and it's ruling on the vexatious claim that bottled water can prevent dehydration is perfectly sensible

Read the full article at the Guardian for a sensible explanation of why the EU did not, in fact, "rule that water was not good for you" or whatever. The article also takes the time to bash all the right-wing tabloids that picked up and distorted the news (welcome to the club, Slashdot).

(If you look at the date on the document I just linked to, you'll notice that this was all published in February, which makes it remarkable that so many journalists happened to leap on this story at the same time, completely independently of each other, without anyone copying what anyone else did or churnalizing each other in any way whatsoever).

So what about the actual claim? Well you can read the EU's ruling here (PDF), and the first thing to note is that this isn't really a rule so much as a piece of advice, which member states are free to interpret as they wish.

...The specific health claim tested is outlined in the ruling:

The regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration and of concomitant decrease of performance.

The claim wasn't submitted for a genuine product, but was created as a deliberate 'test' exercise by the two professors, who were apparently already unhappy with the European Food Standards Authority. The panel were well aware of it's absurdity too, noting drily that "the proposed risk factors," the conditions addressed by the hypothetical product, in this case water loss, "are measures or water depletion and thus are measures of the disease (dehydration)."

Leaving that aside, there are two major problems with the claim: drinking water doesn't prevent dehydration, and drinking-water doesn't prevent dehydration.

Firstly, "regular consumption" of water doesn't reduce the risk of dehydration any more than eating a pork pie a day reduces the risk of starvation. If I drink half a pint of bottled water while running through a desert in the blistering sun, I'll still end up dehydrated, and if I drink several bottles today, that won't prevent me from dehydrating tomorrow. The key is to drink enough water when you need it, and you're not going to get that from any bottled water product unless it's mounted on a drip.

Secondly, dehydration doesn't just mean a lack of water, or 'being thirsty'; electrolytes like sodium are important too. If salt levels fall too far, the body struggles to regulate fluid levels in the first place. That's why hospitals use saline drips to prevent dehydration in patients who can't take fluids orally, and why people with diarhhoea are treated with salt-containing oral rehydration fluids. Presumably the next big investigation at the Express will expose the shocking waste of NHS money on needless quantities of saline solution, when jolly old tap water would work just as well.

So the ruling seems pretty sensible to me, or at least as sensible as a ruling can be when the claim being tested is vexatious in the first place. It's accurate advice, and it prevents companies selling bottled water from making exaggerated claims for their products, which is a good thing. They even have the support of the British Soft Drinks Association, who tweeted just as this piece was going live with the following statement:

The European Food Safety Authority has been asked to rule on several ways of wording the statement that drinking water is good for hydration and therefore good for health. It rejected some wordings on technicalities, but it has supported claims that drinking water is good for normal physical and cognitive functions and normal thermoregulation.

It's also an great opportunity to challenge received wisdom, and to make the point that keeping the human body hydrated is about much more than just drinking tap water when you're thirsty. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of journalists are more interested in promoting second-hand hysteria than informing their readers. Which is a bit sad.

Someone at the Guardian wrote about this. It was not submitted by bottled water manufacturers:

The claim wasn't submitted for a genuine product, but was created as a deliberate 'test' exercise by the two professors, who were apparently already unhappy with the European Food Standards Authority.

Now, the ruling from the EU says that the application failed to comply with Article 14 of Regulation 1924/2006, which states "It is necessary to ensure that the
  substances for which a claim is made have been shown to have a beneficial nutritional or physiological effect".

I'm guessing that the point where this application tripped up is that they didn't suggest how much water or how often would be beneficial and apparently didn't provide any evidence for the claim, so they haven't actually shown it is beneficial as required by Article 14.

Don't forget to deduce all the tax cuts and helps wind power gets to see how cheap it really is.

Yeah because nuclear energy never benefited from public subventions.

As for Fukushima, Chernobyl and similar, count the deaths they caused.

Try to be a bit realistic for a while and assess the potential disaster that an accident like Fukushima went inches from. Nuclear apologists on slashdot are quick at scoffing anti-nuclear as irrational but to me from what I read here they look even more blind and fanatic.

I don't think the EU has those laws -- the UK doesn't.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jun/23/primark.children

The only thing that stops companies is media/customer pressure.

"... less than a week after a United Nations agency warned that Iran was secretly working to develop a nuclear weapon..."

That is not what the UN warned or reported. The headline is repeating western propaganda. Read this, this, this, or this.

"http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15653282 - trade is flagging,"

No, the trade deficit just spiked for a month.

"http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_national_debt - debt is growing."

Well of course it is, that's what happens when you have a deficit, and it'll continue this way until you eliminate the deficit, which is kind of the point in what I've been advocating.

"http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/oct/31/business-confidence-lowest-for-30-months - business confidence craters."

That's great, but the economy still grew 0.5% last quarter.

"Deficits are not significantly affected."

Yes it is, the government deficit reduction is still perfectly on track, well, actually, it's ahead of schedule. It was about £178bn when Labour left power, it's set to be down to about £122bn this year:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/oct/21/government-borrowing-september-budget-deficit

The original plan was to eliminate it by 2015, it's quite possible we'll do it earlier.

So what happens when the deficit is gone? well, if we're smart we start running a surplus, what do we do with surplus? we reduce that afformentioned national debt that you mentioned is growing.

I'm not entirely sure you understand all this, it seems a bit odd you'd complain about debt growth, whilst complaining about deficit reduction - of course when you're spending more than you're making your debts are going to increase, what do you think happens? This is the whole point in eliminating our deficit, so we can reduce our debt or at very least stop it growing.

Nope. Not a FUD. Wanna bet?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15653282 - trade is flagging,
http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_national_debt - debt is growing.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/oct/31/business-confidence-lowest-for-30-months - business confidence craters.
Deficits are not significantly affected.

However, economy has slowed down into almost a double-dip so lost revenue growth over 10 years would be more than "savings" from austerity.

So, remind me, what austerity program tries to achieve? I distinctly remember words like 'business confidence' and 'spur the investments' - both have demonstrably failed to happen.

They were never evil. They're not MS/Apple. Do you have a short term memory loss? Honeycomb was withheld, and they told people why.

They said basically honeycomb was a bad implementation, they didn't want people to move forward with it, they do want people to move forward on ICS. It's not like a "honeycomb is a goddamn secret!" This has been announced like 500x. It's like a design for a car that they say "this design causes engines to explode" so they don't release the design. Is this a surprise that they then release ICS source? Did you hear them say "ICS is a bad implementation"? No.

That's not a lack of transparency either, they announced this repeatedly.

[Andy] Rubin says that if Google were to open-source the Honeycomb code now, as it has with other versions of Android at similar periods in their development, it couldn't prevent developers from putting the software on phones "and creating a really bad user experience. We have no idea if it will even work on phones." "Android is an open-source project," he adds. "We have not changed our strategy."

According to the original The Guardian article, the EDF's 'head of nuclear production security' is going to prison for three years.

I'm sure Android users never get drunk or do stupid things.

To be fair, I don't know of any Android developers who have lost their expensive, super-secret prototype phones after a night at the bar. Twice.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/20/us-military-lifts-ban-gay-troops
Don't Ask, Don't Tell – the US military's 18-year ban on openly gay and lesbian service personnel – has officially been repealed, ushering in a new era for the country's armed forces.

So both you, and your beloved Apple products will be welcome in today's Army!

Flest enskumælandi löndum mun ekki fjarlægja kommur egar kommurnar eru í frönsk nöfn. T.d., "Renée".

Ég get skilið að ýða japansku eða kínversku nöfn, en íslenska stafrófið er ekki svona óvenjulegt. Mér finnst.

Indeed, but they also have to comply with the law of every country that they do business in. And, soon Twitter's international HQ will be based in the E.U., so they will be subject to more regulation (they do say they're already E.U. Data Protection compliant).

"I want everybody to be fully aware of the rights we apparently forfeit every time we sign one of these user agreements that no one reads," said Jonsdottir.

That' right everyone, remember when you store your information on a computer in the US, be fully aware that information is now subject to US laws.

Someone better warn her that her Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo are also at risk. Even her eBay and Google searches, maybe even some info sent through her iPhone or Android device if it passed through Apple or Google servers.

Susan Greenfield has a history of making these claims, without a scrap of evidence to back them up. For a more sceptical treatment of the subject, see Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column of a couple of weeks ago: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/21/bad-science-publishing-claims

To be truly fair, the tax would also have to be based on historic total emissions - i guess you would need 2 taxes to make this work. That would raise the amount that the US pays, but lower it for small countries that are high per-capita emitters but low overall historically. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02/co2-emissions-historical

It's not "astroturfing" when it's using actual, published numbers.

Apple is one of the few PC vendors growing their marketshare at the moment in hardware (and this is *not* including iOS devices - those are measured separately). It's not a torrent, but it is measurable, non-negligable, year-on-year growth for the past few years.

Just because you personally don't know anyone who bought one doesn't make anything that contradicts your single-data-point-anecdotal opinion automatically an astroturf attempt.

But then, you won't believe me because I'm contradicting you. First google hit though:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/may/24/apple-sales-growth-pc-market

$378.4bn into "dollar accounts" you get a $110m "forfeiture" i.e. 2% of your bank's $12.3bn profit.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs
So strange how different parts of the US gov can find the cash and time to hunt cyber millions but fail to get a court to understand drug billions....

If they can draft you to fight and die on a foreign battlefield, why not draft you to serve as a lawmaker? How many guys came back from Vietnam with no job prospects during the stagflation of the 1970's. For their service I do think jurors who devote more than three months toward a single case should be entitled to a supplementary pension. Congress has been giving themselves a pension for decades, even those who serve only one term, so why not the same for a jury?

I disagree that college education or land ownership or who your daddy was should have any effect on who get's to serve. An entrance exam could be designed and administered by the first jury of the sanity check branch could be put into place to exclude individuals who would not be competent to serve.

As for your single-parent example, even our current jury duty system has exemptions for single parents and others with hardship. For what it is worth, though, even serving as a juror on a criminal trail can have career consequences. See link below for a jury case in the UK that lasted two whole years: http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2005/jun/12/workandcareers.observercashsection.

This is Michael O'Leary just drumming up some free PR by proposing something completely outrageous so that it gets mentioned in all the papers. Last time it was suggesting that they'd charge people to go to the toilet.

That proposal (like this one) will never actually happen.

We could also substantially reduce our emissions by buying fewer goods from overseas. One cargo ship emits the equivalent pollution of 50 million cars (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-pollution).

Crap.

Don't confuse CO2 with "cancer and asthma-causing chemicals "

Read to the bottom of the article and find "Shipping is responsible for 3.5% to 4% of all climate change emissions".

That's only 4% for the total shipping fleet.

We could also substantially reduce our emissions by buying fewer goods from overseas. One cargo ship emits the equivalent pollution of 50 million cars (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-pollution). Here's another way of putting it from the article:

Just 15 of the world's biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world's 760m cars.

Making more of an effort to produce items more locally is sort of the same as "living closer to where we work", but it has benefits far beyond a shorter commute. Additionally, where most of us live we probably have stricter environmental controls, which would mean that what IS produced is produced more cleanly. This would likely drive up the costs of goods, forcing us to buy fewer items of higher quality and own them longer, which would provide further environmental (and, dare I say, social) benefits. Overall, it seems like a good plan.

Germany has used locally produced appliances in preference to imports for a long time... they'll pay $800 for a dishwasher with 1/3 the capacity of an "American" dishwasher (made in China) that sells for $300.

Are you suggesting that Americans start living and thinking like Germans? Not likely to happen until the WWII vets / Great Depression survivors (and most of their children) are dead.

Just 15 of the world's biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world's 760m cars.

Making more of an effort to produce items more locally is sort of the same as "living closer to where we work", but it has benefits far beyond a shorter commute. Additionally, where most of us live we probably have stricter environmental controls, which would mean that what IS produced is produced more cleanly. This would likely drive up the costs of goods, forcing us to buy fewer items of higher quality and own them longer, which would provide further environmental (and, dare I say, social) benefits. Overall, it seems like a good plan.

CO2 outpaces worst-case scenarios yet the heat doesn't show up.

I can't tell if you're trolling, or if you're actually that fucking ignorant.

Perhaps the computer models were wrong*. [* actually, computer models give you whatever result you want if you tweak them the right way, so they technically, they gave the 'right' results]

Likewise, climate models are designed to simulate the physicsof the global ecosystem, and not just perform statistical regressions.

Perhaps next time you might consider having the slightest fucking clue of what you're talking about before joining a discussion with adults?

How times change...

The EPA was formed under a republican president.

From Why the GOP is going after the EPA

Beyond the economic argument, do we really want to go back to the days before the EPA? Nixon's first EPA administrator, William Ruckelshaus, describes that time in the Wall Street Journal:

"We humans with our big cars and our big factories and our big cities were discharging terrible stuff into the air and water, and it had to be stopped or we would soon make our nest uninhabitable. The public was growing increasingly outraged. Every night on colour television, we saw yellow sludge flowing into blue rivers; every day, as we drove to work, we saw black smudges against the barely visible blue sky. We knew that our indiscriminate use of pesticides and toxic substances was threatening wildlife and public health.

        "But we didn't do much about it. Until 1970, most regulation of industry was done by the states, which competed so strongly for plants and jobs that regulating companies to protect public health was beyond them.

        "Environmentally, it was a race to the bottom."

He physically hurt no-one.

Yeah, I heard Chinese sweatshops are actually fun to work in.

Something from the theme at hand: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2011/aug/15/susan-greenfield-video
Brain change is equal to climate change, gaming teaches that actions have no consequences and so on.

ex. AFAICT, you're not allowed to sell your book on Amazon for less than you sell it on the Apple App Store even though the Apple App Store takes a larger share of the profits, so you either have to raise your prices everywhere, or take a bigger loss on your App Store sales, or avoid the App Store altogether

Amazon was among several other companies that were temporarily excluded from this deal. Once the exclusion expired, they have simply removed link to the store from iOS version of the app. More recently, Amazon has made Kindle cloud reader, which comes (among other options) as an iOS-aware HTML5 app, and thus skirts all iOS App Store restrictions. And yes, it can download books to be read offline.

I'm surprised at how infrequently France makes the cut in lists of major arms-supplying nuisances. The US has the largest share of the arms export market in absolute terms, but as a percentage of GDP the French surpass the Americans by far, and they have a great list of past clients, like the Hutus of Rwanda (1) and Gaddafi (2).

(1) French arms, war and genocide in Rwanda: http://www.springerlink.com/content/j5571355l6m6rr48/ ; see also http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/5706 and, for more recent take, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jan/11/rwanda.insideafrica.

(2) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22189006/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/gadhafi-visits-france-arms-nuclear-deals/, from that trip where he set up his tent on the Champs-Élysées. Great quote:

Human Rights Minister Rama Yade expressed disgust with the symbolism of the chosen date of International Human Rights Day. 'It would be indecent, in any case, that this visit be summed up with the signing of contracts,' she said in an interview published Monday in the daily Le Parisien.

Your post is a bit incoherent - are you trying to accuse me of being paranoid?

Here's some reading for you.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/02/uk-military-iran-attack-nuclear

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/03/iran-nuclear-ambitions-secret-war

Come back when you have a clearer picture of your country's current political strategy.

Your post is a bit incoherent - are you trying to accuse me of being paranoid?

Here's some reading for you.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/02/uk-military-iran-attack-nuclear

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/03/iran-nuclear-ambitions-secret-war

Come back when you have a clearer picture of your country's current political strategy.

He's only one term in. Looks like you guys will be bombing Iran soon: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/02/us-heading-war-iran-obama

Recent news is that India has committed to the development of a commercial scale thorium reactor, with a target date for completion of 2020.

Nobody with any cents invests long-term but, as I noted earlier, anybody with any sense certainly does. If you don't, you have a 66% chance of losing on any given transaction.

No, but you might be a poor investor. Yes, it'll boost immediate returns but only by sacrificing long-term benefits. The benefit will be brief. It's things like this that are why investment is almost entirely cognitive illusion and not based on skill or rational thought. The ones who are any good work along selective inaction. Responding to the market is the worst thing you can do.

Android apps are not Linux apps, they're Dalvik apps. They're compiled to the Dalvik VM bytecode. And the API has nothing to do with Linux's.

But OK, than what about Android emulation for QNX? QNX is definitively not Linux.

Finally, like since Oct 28th

28 Oct 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/28/iphone-4s-battery-apple-engineers?INTCMP=SRCH

Looks like somebody's late for Hate Week

"Faith" has no place in a field based on empirical evidence and doubt.

This ignores the fact that faith plays an enormous role in the unsteady progression of science. Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of the Scientific Revolution provides many examples where faith, politics and other irrational aspects of human nature have always pulled science in directions contrary to what should be a steady progression of knowledge.

Humans decide which areas of science deserve study. Global warming (aka climate change), oil production and weapons development gets more funding than breast cancer and potentially hazardous asteroids. AIDs and obesity gets more funding than diarrheal diseases and malaria-- not for scientific reasons, not because funded studies can improve more lives, but for political and economic reasons. Even once a project is funded, we shouldn't ignore real bias applied by individual scientists and teams based on their expectations. This isn't just falsified data. Some data is overlooked because it doesn't fit expectations-- our paradigm. On the surface this may not appear the same as religious faith-- indeed because it tends to be far more subtle, it is more dangerous.

Do we trust anthropogenic climate change research (in an environment where dissenting research isn't funded and anomalous data and opinions are marginalized)? Most of us trust it enough to want to make our modern world more efficient, some trust it enough to want to switch to potentially hazardous energy alternatives such as solar and nuclear. But should we trust it enough to modify the climate? We don't have a very good track record regarding the use of science to modify ecological systems?

Science has become a profession, usually far removed from the experience of ordinary individuals-- we all rely on faith. So we believed the tobacco industry studies which told us that smoking wasn't hazardous, we don't worry about the curious lack of studies on the long-term effects of GM foods, BPA and artificial fats and sweeteners. We have faith in science.

"New scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. -- Max Planck