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I couldn't find a full copy of Melville B. Nimmer, “National Security Secrets v. Free Speech: The Issues Left Undecided in the Ellsberg Case", but for anyone who wants to dig in, here's a link to a preview of the article in jstor. It says you can sign up for free and you get to rent articles for 14 days.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/...

Yeah, they are in consensus that it's been getting a little warmer

A lot warmer, if you're interested in ecology. Take eucalyptus species for and example. 25% of species have a range that spans less that 1C in mean temperature. That means that a 1C change in temperature puts the new long-term survivable range completely outside their current range. That comes with a significant extinction risk, and where movement is blocked by the edge of continents, tops of mountains, or human land use, it get this think called "committed to extinction"

...and humans contributed a little to that.

The consensus is probably contributed the majority of that.

I think most people would say likely all of it, or slightly more. (We are in the cooling part of the Milankovic cycle, having hit the peak about 8000 years ago, so many reconstructions of natural climate is that it would be in a slow cooling ... other things being equal.)

Why do you need that to prove the heliocentric model?

Because stellar parallax had been suggested as a necessary requirement for the heliocentric theory to be correct since the 1500s. Various attempts to measure it by Galileo's time had failed. So, the absence of parallax was one significant strike against heliocentrism in Galileo's day, if you go by evidence and scientific method. (Of course, the reality is that the "fixed stars" were much farther away than anyone thought possible, so it took much longer to measure the tiny movements necessary to show parallax.)

You just need to look at the planetary movement of one of the outer planets, like Mars. The outer planets appear to make a loop if watched from earth. The apparent retrograde motion could also be explained with deferent and epicycle but then you already left the geocentric model.

You should read some actual history of science, rather than the inaccurate executive summary version from some TV documentary.

In case you didn't know, Galileo's model of the solar system used perfect circles rather than ellipses (contrary to Kepler's elliptical model at the time, which actually fit the data -- Galileo frequently ignored inconvenient data when it didn't fit his astronomical theories). Thus, Galileo's model (and Copernicus's too) still required the whole Ptolemaic apparatus of epicycles. Contrary to popular belief, the circular heliocentric model that Galileo endorsed -- 'cause circles are cool and "perfect"! -- did not result in significantly easier math to explain the orbits.

Dig a little further into the controversy (for example, here or here, just to start with a few articles that are ~40 years old, showing how long historians of science have been pointing out significant problems), and you'll discover all sorts of other problems with Galileo's theories. For one, he originally wanted to publish his book as a theory of the tides -- because, frankly, that was the ONLY reason he had according to empirical science of the day that would differentiate a geocentric and heliocentric model. Of course -- well, the tides were caused by the moon, not the sun (again, Galileo thought Kepler's ideas that the moon caused the tides were stupid). But the bigger hole is that Galileo's theory required there to be only one high tide per day. As anyone who lived near the ocean at the time knew, there were two tides per day... but, well, that didn't fit with Galileo's theory. Oh well.

And, yeah, that was basically the only incontrovertible evidence Galileo put forward that proved heliocentrism over geocentrism (and note these were not just ignorant geocentrists: many of those in the Church at the time favored the Tyconic model, based on ideas from Kepler's teacher Tycho Brahe, who actually spent decades doing detailed empirical observations).

Seriously -- there were all sorts of valid objections to the earth's motion at the time when Newton's laws of motion weren't yet fully understood. Like why don't we fly off if the Earth is moving at such high speeds? Why don't we feel the motion? Why aren't there ridiculously high winds caused by rotation at high speed? Etc. We now know why these things don't happen, but actual scientists at the time weren't sure.

And Galileo's astronomical evidence really didn't amount to much (if he accepted Kepler's models, he might have something that fit the data better, but it still couldn't prove the motion of the Earth).

So, he hung his whole assertion of the proof of heliocentrism on the tidal theory -- which was so idiotic and so obviously contrary to observable evidence (one tide per day that has to come at noon?!?) that the censors refused to let him title his book "On the Tides" or whatever he wanted to call it, so he came up with the "Discourse on the Two World Systems" title.

Galileo was a great

"public-facing web page"

public-facing web page.

> One factor that made Aaron Swartz's behavior so reprehensible was that he _kept doing it_, apparently at full capacity,
> despite the obvious consequences to JSTOR and to MIT.

If you read JSTOR's own account, available on their website, Swartz continued to download between September and January, but without them noticing it. Somehow that makes me believe that he modified his behavior (including throttled bandwidth) so that only a new kind of analysis on JSTOR's part (probably statistical) gave him away.

> But I do believe that was already planned when Aaron got caught.

Obviously I cannot refute this, nor can you back this up with hard evidence.

> JSTOR is a library service, a non-profit. They'll do what they can _afford_ to do to make the information available.

They continued to pursue Swartz in January not because his downloading was costing them too much money, but because they feared that what he would do with the documents would cost them their goodwill with their upstream publishing partners. They could well have been correct (no one can know exactly what Swartz's long-term plans were). It seems pretty obvious to me that JSTOR, albeit a non-profit, was also an ossified bureaucracy, and whatever changes have happened since the incident are due to their management suddenly understanding that the way things "worked" ten years ago was no longer exactly what their users (or society) expected now (e.g., when they were founded, 99.9% of anyone looking for academic papers through the net were anyway academics/geeks --- now, I expect that a good segment of the general browsing population is also interested).

From thinking that the atom was indivisible to actually splitting atoms within a span of some 40 years, all the people involved in the pioneering work were idiots of the first magnitude. Oh and Pierre (Nobel laureate) and Marie Curie (twice a Nobel laureate) did breed, their daughter Irène Joliot-Curie was awarded (shared with her husband, Frederic Joliot-Curie) the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 for the discovery of artificial radioactivity but clearly, the entire family was a bunch of hillbillies because they did not realize that radiation was dangerous to human health and failed to take proper precautionary measures.

As for your attempt to degrade Islam in order to draw attention to yourself, Id point out, religion is a closed system with its own rules relegating wisdom to higher powers and isnt relevant here. Unless ,of course, Curie spilled isotope on herself whilst on her prayer rug.

It is relevant because those muftis are saying pretty much the same thing you are and if humanity had subjected itself to what you are selling, we'd still be living in caves, hunting during the day and cowering in fear during the night, eating uncooked food and going around naked! Christopher Columbus would never have discovered the Americas (both the North and the South), Australia and the Antarctic wouldn't be on our world map (and the rest of the world wouldn't be on the world map of the Native Americans and the Aborigins) and the Christians and Muslims would have wars over whether the earth was flat and the center of the universe (what the Church said) or if it was round and revolved around the sun which itself was hurtling through space (what the Quran says).
Also, if talking against these muftis and their idiotic fatwa somehow degrades Islam, then by that same logic every time I condemn the imbecile mullahs and muftis over fatwas glorifying the Taliban/al-Quaida, I somehow degrade Islam. Rest assured, despite what the fundamentalists on either side will have you believe, that is not the case. Islam, the religion, and the mullahs (along with their fatwas) are not the same thing!
And Marie Curie was an atheist so her being found on a prayer mat would be a shocking revelation. Read some history!
Oh and for the record, I am a Muslim so your 'outrage' at the perceived degradation is misplaced!

Perhaps her discovery was more chance than skill. It happens. Even the dopiest hillbilly can win the lottery.

Yes and based on chance discoveries, she was awarded the Nobel prize twice implying that the Nobel Committee was comprised of idiots.
Einstein was an idiot too...he said in an interview that Hendrik Lorentz and Madam Curie were two individuals he respected the most.
Of course with your wisdom and intellect you know better about how to judge another person's intellect and the rabble who praised and still praise Madam Marie Curie for her accomplishments are a bunch of hillbillies.

cf Boyle, Robert "The Skeptical Chymist" 1661.

The same Robert Boyle that self-identified as an alchemist in 1675? That Robert Boyle?

Look up the SIME/DIME experiments.

Anaxagoras, Socrates, Aristotle. In ancient Greece (or Athens, specifically), the charge of impiety was sometimes used for political reasons (i.e. to dispose of people that the public, or at least a few influential individuals, found to be a nuisance or an menace). Sounds like there was a political angle to the modern case as well. The more things change... Here's a link to an article about the history of this practice. That said, what was this guy trying to accomplish by mocking a dead monk? Not a cool thing to do, whatever your religious views.

It still does, but you simply disagree with how people are using it. Still, I'm curious as to what you think it used to mean.

This.

noun
1. an official who examines material that is about to be released, such as books, movies, news, and art, and suppresses any parts that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.

2. (in ancient Rome) either of two magistrates who held censuses and supervised public morals.

The Production Code Administration was true censorship, and even though it wasn't a government official, it did control what was produced. Not just sold, but what made it to film.

The PCA was given the authority to review and delete what it felt was morally objectionable material from both the final script before a movie was shot, and the finished movie before it was released.

This wasn't a case of simply finding a different movie house to view the film you wanted to see, it simply wasn't made.

In 1942, Byron Price published this article identifying censorship as an evil, albeit a necessary evil during time of war. He was the US Director of Censorship, and even he admitted it was evil. Even as late as that time, censorship was viewed as "bad".

Today, it means any limit put on anyone's free expression in any medium. It's "censorship" if Jeff Bezos decides not to sell a book based on its content. But amazingly, it is not censorship if a librarian decides not to buy a book for the library based on the content. This makes "censorship" a useless word. Ultimately, is it not suppression of your right of free expression if I choose not to read your article in /., and even moreso if I choose not to buy your book? That makes it "censorship" under this useless definition.

And please don't tell me that those who cry "censorship" when denouncing the evil capitalist Amazon or BandN or whatever aren't trying to draw on the collective memory of when censorship truly was a bad thing and not a normal part of everyday life. They count on the pejorative meaning sticking to the victim, not the useless one.

The NSA and other law enforcement agencies around the world are using these technologies to good effect.

How do we know that? All we have is the words of people who have been found to lie about, well, everything that we can check. The reasonable assumption is that they lie about everything that we can't check, too. They could easily tell us something that can be checked, such as pointing to a foiled terrorist attack, and explaining how mass surveillance helped foil it.

We shouldn't throw that away because the early incarnations of the administration and use of these technologies is flawed.

Part of what keeps the system in check will always be rules. Rules are pointless if they are not followed. If people believe they will never be punished for breaking the rules, it will be much harder to make them follow the rules. If we don't punish people who have broken the rules we have now, how are you going to convince people that they will be punished for breaking rules in the future?

(Failing that, then it's as I stated earlier: You argue just to argue.)

Ad hominid.

Wouldn't that be a commentary on the species as a whole?

The danger of Chicken Pox is that if you get it, later in life you will have a high risk of getting Shingles, a very painful disease causes by the Chickenpox Virus.

By not vaccinating your kid you've effectively doomed them with horrible odds of getting a very painful disease later in life. Asshole.

Actually, a somewhat perverse side-effect of widespread chickenpox vaccination in the US is that it seems to have caused the incidence of shingles in adults to increase. (cf: Herpes Zoster–Related Hospitalizations and Expenditures Before and After Introduction of the Varicella Vaccine in the United States) The reason is presumably that intermittent exposure to children with chickenpox gives an immunity boost to adults who had the disease as children. There is a shingles vaccine which is recommended by the CDC (for almost all) adults over 60, but it seems that not many people actually elect to take it. When you get down to it, the reason most children are caught up on their vaccinations is school requirements. There is no similar pressure for adults except for those working in certain fields (childcare, etc.).

War propaganda is as old as war itself.

No, it's not. Propaganda, as such, especially military propaganda, is fairly modern. Ancient/classical militaries didn't depend much on popular support. There was political grandstanding, sure, but that's very different.

I guess you never studied ancient history. Here's one example of an academic who disagrees with you. Personally I considered Pericles' Funeral Oration pretty full of propaganda.

If memory serves me correctly it was a fairly major issue during Hannibal's Italy campaign as well as the Pyrrhic War.

How about the hundred years war?

Or did I misunderstand your meaning of modern?

I think JSTOR was taken aback by their sudden role in the case and has made some good moves since (starting with the decision to oppose prosecution in that case).

There are a substantial number of librarians there, who tend to have fairly civic-minded views, and see themselves as on the pro-information-dissemination side of things. The main counteracting forces are: 1) for post-1923 journals, the journals rather than JSTOR ultimately own the copyright, so JSTOR has to work with them to be allowed to digitize them at all (and has perhaps in the past been too deferential to their views); and 2) as a slow-moving, somewhat conservative institution, they're focused more on traditional archival questions like how to preserve things for posterity, and what kinds of revenue streams will support that, and less on broadening current access.

In the time since the Swartz case, they have made all out-of-copyright issues freely available, which is a move they could make unilaterally, and is a big increase in the amount of old journal content now available online, in high-quality scans with good metadata.

The point is, if you don't show up, your "vote" will be read as apathy and passive consent.

No, the point is by showing up and voting you're providing active consent and support for a system that I believe is no longer working. I'd rather have some delusional simpleton misinterpret my actions than perform actions that actively show support for their delusions.

You do realize, the Soviet Union had and China, Cuba and North Korea all have elections. And voter turnout is higher than it is in the US (100% in North Korea). There are reasons for having elections where governments rule by fiat. Voting isn't some magic power. Not voting in a system where voting doesn't really effect the system is a form of dissent. Voting is showing support for the system.

This is an opportune moment to mention one of my favorite scientific paper titles ever.

Great examples, I will add more ...

- The Eruv system, where on the Sabbath it is forbidden to carry stuff from one place to another unless it is an enclosed farm or something. So a wire is set up on utility posts to encircle the whole city, and therefore observant Jews can move stuff from one place to the other. This is implemented in several major cities in the USA.

- The seventh year farmland must be fallow rule (Shmita). Land owned by Jews in Israel is sold on paper to Palestinians using an intermediary lawyer, so it can be farmed and harvested that year, then at the end of the year, the ownership is transferred back to the original Jew.

- Jewish restaurants in Budapest serve patrons on Saturday, but you have to come a day earlier and pay in advance.

Yes, similar "juristic tricks" are in other religions. For example, some were developed centuries ago in Islam (called just that Hiyal: tricks, loopholes) to circumvent certain laws, and several authors have written against them condemning the practice.

According to this, "it has been estimated that hospitalacquired infections are responsible for 80,000 deaths in the United States and 5,000 deaths in the United Kingdom." "Compliance rates were ... lower among physicians (32%)." So only 32% of doctors are washing their hands, killing 80,000 people per year. I will let the reader decide whether they want to compare this to the deaths caused by automobiles (32,367) or handguns (31,672), but apparently keeping hands clean in hospitals is a serious public health problem, and one that, of all people, hospital administrators, doctors and nurses should all be doing everything they can to fix it.

The good news is that micromanagement works: "The majority of the time, the situations that were associated with a higher compliance rate were those having to do with dirty tasks, the introduction of alcoholbased hand rub or gel, performance feedback, and accessibility of materials."

This isn't about monitoring bathroom breaks, it is about monitoring basic competence to do your job. A patient is supposed to end a hospital visit healthier than they started, and if health care professionals are doing things that make that goal more difficult then they are failing at their job. It's not the same as, say, monitoring the number of lines of code that a developer writes (where there is, at best, a tenuous relationship between the measured value and the quality of software - and probably none at all), it is a well-documented and serious problem that kills people. It's more like measuring whether a developer leaves his workstation turned off all day. Washing hands regularly is a necessary though not sufficient condition to make people healthy in a hospital, and if constant monitoring is required to get more than 1/3 of doctors to do it, then so be it.

There are a variety of hypothesized ways to generate entirely new species, but they have not been observed directly.

Not true.

Can somebody tell me why they can't put a refinery up in Canada, or even in ND where there is lots of oil. Running a pipeline all the way across the country just so this tar sand oil can be put through refineries that are going to be shut down by the storms in the gulf which are getting bigger due to climate change seems silly.

The Influence of Economic Factors on the Location of Oil Refineries

Yes. The article can be found here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/669034

The wrong link in the summary should be http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/669034

Not to be picky, but the url to "An artile signed by 18 academics" is http://www.jstor.org/action/cookieAbsent "cookieAbsent" doesn't exactly look like it was ever supposed to work. Does someone have a link to the actual signed article?

It was more complex than "if first_child == girl then kill first_child", but the custom did exist.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2799344

Look, I guess it is an acronym, but they don't even explain it on their about page:

About JSTOR

It could be a random brand name for all I know, like Yahoo or Twitter. Basically, it's a company that makes money providing students access to digitized scholarly article.

Oh, they have this on the about page:

We are deeply saddened to hear the news about Aaron Swartz. We extend our heartfelt condolences to Aaronâ(TM)s family, friends, and everyone who loved, knew, and admired him. He was a truly gifted person who made important contributions to the development of the internet and the web from which we all benefit.

I'm surprised at the sympathy for the fearsome criminal who stole from them, and who the prosecutors felt needed to face 35-50 years at trial to protect us all from this monster.

Who or what the fuck is a JSTOR? Would it kill the summary writer to explain the acronym?

Most people know what it is, because of the Swartz-case. So you missed it - fine - but rambling about it on a geek-site like /. is hardly the way to go.

Have you tried Googling it?
https://www.google.com/search?q=JSTOR

have you tried looking it up on Wikipedia?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSTOR

Have you tried simply visiting their homepage - perhaps even their "about" page?
http://about.jstor.org/

Was that so hard? Really?

Seriously ... as a reader and poster here ... you have failed! :-)

- Jesper

"If Aaron Swartz downloaded JSTOR documents without paying for them, it would presumably be considered a crime by the USDOJ. But if U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz or U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder did the same? Rather than a crime, it would be considered their entitlement, a perk of an elite education that's paid for by their alma maters." http://about.jstor.org/alumni#Institutions-in-program Many universities on that "elite" list of institutions are public universities with very liberal admission policies, and alumni are "entitled" to use JSTOR after working for several years on a degree and presumably providing tens of thousands of dollars in tuition to the university who is paying the benefit. I know we have a lot of "Occupy" fans around here, but do we have to inject the us-vs-them narrative at every opportunity? Give it a rest. Of course, the author may just be taking their cue from the manifesto itself, where Mr. Swartz insisted that scientists and students have been "given a privilege" in being able to access research articles. Because, you know, the $23000 I made last year as a research assistant and PhD student was such a privilege for someone with an engineering degree and a family to feed. I'm also privileged to carry about $50000 in student loan debt between undergraduate and graduate studies...how wonderful. And when I graduate and hopefully find a good job, the narrative of how privileged and entitled I am will continue. Sadly, despite poor execution, Aaron had a great cause. Open access is the _only_ way to publish, and publishers like Elsevier that make it wholly impossible to do a decent research project without a large budget or affiliated institution are the devil. However, what "children of the global south (quoted from his manifesto)" really need is material like the Khan academy videos followed by Coursera/Udacity/etc... They aren't going to find their way to a better life in the stuffy annals of academic journals which most college graduates cannot comprehend (I'm working on a dissertation and still can't comprehend many of the articles in my field). If you want to make a difference, start asking researchers at your local university if they have considered publishing in open access journals. If not, ask them why. Ask them if they would consider paying the open access fee to a more prestigious journal so that their research can be read freely. At least ask them to do this for work with broad impact and importance, even if the fee isn't deemed worth it for every paper they generate. Finally, start hitting up the sources of funding and try to get them to include open-access requirements for research they pay for. There is a push to do just this with all federally-funded research, and I think that would be a great start. If you are feeling extra frisky, you might even consider making a donation to an open-access journal, but I think the "children of the global south" would probably appreciate a donation of food, water, or mosquito nets even more. It seems to me Aaron jumped to illegal activity when there were plenty of legal options left to pursue. That's unfortunate. This wasn't worth a human life, and the parties who blew this out of proportion should be ashamed of themselves. On the other hand, plenty of people have the 'hammer dropped' on them every day and don't commit suicide. So those in Aaron's inner circle also failed him. In the end, we all lose.

How to Subscribe: "The Alumni Access participation fee for subscribing institutions is 10% of the institution's total AAF. Subscribing institutions must support the bifurcation of alumni from their main JSTOR account via IP based access methods."

I am an alumnus of one to the members of the JSTOR alumni program (Yale).

This article is VERY misleading.

JSTOR is a non-profit company founded by an ex-president of Princeton University aimed at reducing costs associated with maintaining large archives of journals at universities.

The alumni access to JSTOR described was part of a PILOT PROGRAM. This has been extended to all institutions that participate in JSTOR.

In addition JSTOR had nothing to do with the criminal charges brought against Aaron Shwartz. JSTOR asked that no charges be brought.

This was solely the result of actions taken by MIT and the DOJ.

JSTOR in fact is very inclusive. They have programs that provide access to secondary schools, public libraries and so forth.

http://about.jstor.org/fees/13006#tab-fees

Also JSTOR hosts significant public domain content that is available free to anyone.

http://www.jstor.org/

From what I see a organization which is a store house for Mathematics and scientific works.

All of which is either funded through NSF or other grants of public monies.

In case anyone here would like to do their own research, check out the sheer _lengths_ M.I.T. as an institution went to in the destruction of two key figures in the COLD FUSION or low energy atomic reaction physics, Pons and Fleischmann.

It became clear after looking at the problem for the past 2 decades that something was going on here way more than just bad science since Pons and Fleischmann had highly regarded careers that were many decades in length.

These two individuals work into the phenomena of cold fusion or LERs would simply be discredited through the standard peer review process like all theories. No, that wasn't enough for M.I.T., which stood to lose about 3 Billion in revenue/research for its proposed Hot Fusion program, which they saw as a threat at the time.

No, like this young gentleman, Pons and Fleischmann had to be utterly destroyed. Their past work of 30 some years in numerous journals _must_ be removed and banished forever.

_EXTENSIVE_ amounts of money in the MILLIONS of dollars was spent by M.I.T. and other DoD/DoE departments in the Feds was spent to insure Pons and Fleischmann were not just destroyed academically, but financially and every other way possible including extensive budgetary allocations for media in the press to insure the public never ever hears about COLD FUSION or anything like it forever.

M.I.T always has been a disgusting institution along with most of our academic institutions, but they are extensively involved in all sorts of mischief with the Federal Government, and this is just yet another example.

Disgusting.

-Hack

He obtained copies of the documents through automated means, but there has been no proof that he intended to distribute them (although that's what prosecutors claimed).

It's possible that he was planning on doing content analysis of the documents, for which he might've needed a sufficiently large corpus to do the analysis. (and if seems that JSTOR allows that sort of thing, but it wasn't well known, which my understanding was part of the reason they asked the case to be dropped; see http://about.jstor.org/news/jstor-statement-misuse-incident-and-criminal-case )

Yes, he did release the PACER documents -- but those were government files that should've been in the public domain; I view him to be like Carl Malamud in that regard : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Malamud .

JSTOR has posted a condolences note on their website.

Aaron Swartz
We are deeply saddened to hear the news about Aaron Swartz. We extend our heartfelt condolences to Aaron’s family, friends, and everyone who loved, knew, and admired him. He was a truly gifted person who made important contributions to the development of the internet and the web from which we all benefit.

Source http://www.jstor.org/

Our various governments propose ways of "petitioning for redress of grievance", and, as each becomes popular, strive to cut them off.

In British law, as applied to the 13 colonies, a signed petition could be presented to a governing body and it had a duty to respond. As the Yale law journal points out, that was so heavily used in response to slavery that it was withdrawn in the U.S. (see http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/796438?uid=3739448&uid=2&uid=3737720&uid=4&sid=21101604364957) A certain well-known president is trying to bring it back, but that's a different discussion.

With organized petitioning unavailable, personal appeals to one's representative became popular. It soon became impossible to meet your representative, and written letters turned into counts pro and con that their staffs reported.

Groups and companies then banded together and hired lobbyists, to button-hole legislators in the lobby of their building, where the public was allowed. When these became too bothersome, only selected lobbyists were invited to meetings, and the general public was excluded from the buildings.

The press is still allowed in some selected lobbies, but there is always a back corridor available for legislators to use to bypass them.

Groups then started petitioning in person, on the front lawn of the parliament buildings, and occasionally their representatives would come out and meet them. More often, the police closed off access to the building and its vicinity.

No organization, whether legislative or commercial, enjoys hearing criticism. As soon as they get too much from a given channel, that channel will be cut off. Only the occasional brave, duty-oriented legislator will ask their electors for comments.

In my own country of Canada, this last happened when the government of the day asked for broad comments on amending the copyright law, when my local city councilman needed opinions and options on a garbage-collection proposal, and most recently when the CRTC asked for suggestions to moderate the bad practices of cell-phone providers.

Redress of grievance still exists, but it's genuinely rare.

--dave

*ahem*:
Point the first
Point the second
Point the third (and mind the Cryllic - Chrome should translate it)
Point the fourth
Point the fifth ...and so on...

The USSR made it a point to suppress (and eventually try to eliminate) religion, as Marxism wouldn't have room for it.

There are viruses that attack bacteria and fungi, not just animal cells. You can get predator/prey cycles with them, too.

Yes, human rights, the environment, and natural resource depletion are sacred cows in communist countries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_labor_laws_in_the_United_States#Activism_against_child_labor

http://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/laborctr/child_labor/about/us_history.html
>The National Child Labor Committee’s work to end child labor was combined with efforts to provide free, compulsory education for all children

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/367352?uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21101184617233

Or just look up anything about the beginning of compulsory education, it will show you how it was intertwined with the end of child labor.

Soooo dumb. There's a strong correlation between high infant mortality and high fertility rates. There's also a strong correlation between low fertility rates and high GDP per capita. One of the best ways to attack population growth (and boost economic output) is to decrease infant mortality (see here and here for just a couple examples).

People don't need to have a million babies when the babies don't keep dying. Also having your babies die really sucks. Also when you only have to get pregnant twice to make two new people, instead of 3 or 4 or 6 times, you spend a lot more time working and learning, and a lot less time sitting around pregnant and nursing kids.

Besides (and I'm just assuming you're from america, maybe not) we aren't exactly a shining example of women's rights and birth control right at the moment, at least not if certain (white, male) parties got their way. So let's not trash talk africa (who we, the west, are mostly responsible for effing up in the first place) until we fix our own crap.

Mod parent up! And here are some good sources: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/455549?uid=3739656&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101147761451 http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/needs-washed.aspx http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3161

Placebos and nocebos have only EVER been shown to affect SUBJECTIVE factors.

Not true.

Placebos can affect healing of duodenal ulcers:
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/649462?uid=3737496&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21100974892383
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2014313/

Naloxone can block the effects of pain-reduction placebos in some cases.
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/25/45/10390.full

The mind affects the body in many ways.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889159112001936

I had a quick look through some journals and this is the closest thing I could find:
Mating Behavior as a Possible Cause of Bat Fatalities at Wind Turbines, Paul M. Cryan, The Journal of Wildlife Management, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Apr., 2008), pp. 845-849, Allen Press
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25097617

Bats are killed by wind turbines in North America and Europe in large numbers, yet a satisfactory explanation for this phenomenon remains elusive. Most bat fatalities at turbines thus far occur during late summer and autumn and involve species that roost in trees. In this commentary I draw on existing literature to illustrate how previous behavioral observations of the affected species might help explain these fatalities. I hypothesize that tree bats collide with turbines while engaging in mating behaviors that center on the tallest trees in a landscape, and that such behaviors stem from 2 different mating systems (resource defense polygyny and lekking). Bats use vision to move across landscapes and might react to the visual stimulus of turbines as they do to tall trees. This scenario has serious conservation and management implications. If mating bats are drawn to turbines, wind energy facilities may act as population sinks and risk may be hard to assess before turbines are built. Researchers could observe bat behavior and experimentally manipulate trees, turbines, or other tall structures to test the hypothesis that tree bats mate at the tallest trees. If this hypothesis is supported, management actions aimed at decreasing the attractiveness of turbines to tree bats may help alleviate the problem.

The Mating System of Tadarida brasiliensis (Chiroptera: Molossidae) in a Large Highway Bridge Colony, Annika T. H. Keeley and Brian W. Keeley, Journal of Mammalogy , Vol. 85, No. 1 (Feb., 2004), pp. 113-119, American Society of Mammalogists
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1383984

Focal animal sampling at a highway bridge revealed an aggressive and a passive male copulation strategy that may function as adaptations to different roost conditions. During aggressive copulation, the male separates a female from a roost cluster and restricts her movements during mating while he emits characteristic calls. During passive copulation, the male moves very slowly onto a female that roosts in a dense cluster. Passive copulations occur without resistance from the female and without male vocalizations. Both males and females mate with multiple partners, suggesting that mating is promiscuous.

I'm an electronic engineering student, not a biologist, so someone else may find better information!

I had a quick look through some journals and this is the closest thing I could find:
Mating Behavior as a Possible Cause of Bat Fatalities at Wind Turbines, Paul M. Cryan, The Journal of Wildlife Management, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Apr., 2008), pp. 845-849, Allen Press
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25097617

Bats are killed by wind turbines in North America and Europe in large numbers, yet a satisfactory explanation for this phenomenon remains elusive. Most bat fatalities at turbines thus far occur during late summer and autumn and involve species that roost in trees. In this commentary I draw on existing literature to illustrate how previous behavioral observations of the affected species might help explain these fatalities. I hypothesize that tree bats collide with turbines while engaging in mating behaviors that center on the tallest trees in a landscape, and that such behaviors stem from 2 different mating systems (resource defense polygyny and lekking). Bats use vision to move across landscapes and might react to the visual stimulus of turbines as they do to tall trees. This scenario has serious conservation and management implications. If mating bats are drawn to turbines, wind energy facilities may act as population sinks and risk may be hard to assess before turbines are built. Researchers could observe bat behavior and experimentally manipulate trees, turbines, or other tall structures to test the hypothesis that tree bats mate at the tallest trees. If this hypothesis is supported, management actions aimed at decreasing the attractiveness of turbines to tree bats may help alleviate the problem.

The Mating System of Tadarida brasiliensis (Chiroptera: Molossidae) in a Large Highway Bridge Colony, Annika T. H. Keeley and Brian W. Keeley, Journal of Mammalogy , Vol. 85, No. 1 (Feb., 2004), pp. 113-119, American Society of Mammalogists
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1383984

Focal animal sampling at a highway bridge revealed an aggressive and a passive male copulation strategy that may function as adaptations to different roost conditions. During aggressive copulation, the male separates a female from a roost cluster and restricts her movements during mating while he emits characteristic calls. During passive copulation, the male moves very slowly onto a female that roosts in a dense cluster. Passive copulations occur without resistance from the female and without male vocalizations. Both males and females mate with multiple partners, suggesting that mating is promiscuous.

I'm an electronic engineering student, not a biologist, so someone else may find better information!

Can you give a citatiion? Because sorry, but I think you're a liar. I'm having little luck googling for 1932 and 1934 murder rates, most of the links are firewalled off here (meaning they're suspect as good citations anyway), but one I did find asks "alcohol and homocide in the United States 1934-1995:or one reason rates of violence may be going down". It looks like after Prohibition, murder rates dropped and continued to drop.

I could find nothing to back up your assertion. Link, or I'm outing you as another anti-drug liar and likely a member of that pack of liars, the Partnership for a Drug Free America.

Shame on you and your temperance friends.

I will admit that at least some of us basically troll for fun by denying part 1 and part 2 above, because we hate the "solutions" to part 3.

Yeah, so this isn't very productive. Maybe try to figure out which solutions are actually good and push for those? Remember, problems don't go away when we don't like the solutions.

Usually part 3 is the establishment of a neo-pol pot regime, or national socialism, or some financial scam to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, or most commonly meaningless feel good frippery that will do absolutely nothing but "raise awareness".

I'm curious incidentally which solutions you think fall into these categories. I agree that quite a bit falls into the feel good frippery category. Godwin's law aside, last I checked no one was advocating large scale genocide as a solution. At the very minimum, burning people in ovens would make more CO2.

I''m particularly interested into which category you put the most widely suggested method of dealing with CO2 - cap and trade. Cap and trade is a system that has worked quite well for other pollutants. For example, there's clear evidence that cap and trade has worked well in dealing with sulfur dioxide, both reducing emissions and having little negative economic impact. See for example http://www.epa.gov/capandtrade/documents/ctresults.pdf and http://www.jstor.org/stable/2647032 (although it certainly has had its bumps especially due to conflicting court cases and legislation. See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704258604575360821005676554.html. Cap and trade works, since it hybridizes government regulation with market solutions. It estimates the cost of the pollutant to society and then lets the market figure out the most efficient way of keeping the pollutant down. There's a reason that George H. W. Bush helped get cap-and-trade in the Clean Air Act and that many see it is as example of a successful government regulation http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/us/politics/17cap.html?pagewanted=all.

I'm also curious as to what category you put improvements to the electric grid such as adding grid storage and smart grids. All of these can have real, substantial impact. And in the case of grid improvements, they have substantial other benefits as well. There isn't going to be one magic bullet solution to all our CO2 problems or a magic bullet to solve all our energy problems, and certainly not one that will solve both. But there are real, substantial steps that can be taken that don't involve loss of liberties. Comparisons to Nazis are unhelpful hyperbole.

Those farms produce a lot of empty calories for processed foods. They don't really feed people; I highly doubt I could survive on a diet of corn. And feeding it to cows is wrong; it makes the meat less healthy (more omega-6 fats, fewer omega-3), and it acidifies their stomachs which in turn creates an strain of e.coli that is trained to survive in more acidic environments, and thus makes us sick.

But those mid-west farms won't be producing for very long, they are losing topsoil at 18 tonnes per hectare per year according to World Agriculture and Soil Erosion, by the University of California Press

Being a farmer used to be about being a custodian of the land, not a shill for big agribusiness, planting round-up ready GMO crops.

Small diverse farms produce a huge and diverse array of food - more calories per acre that the midwest monoliths. See Elliot Coleman, and Joel Salatin, or read the chapter on Polyface Farms in the Omnivores Dilemna.

But you won't, because it's so ingrained that there are no other options or ways of doing things.

US laws don't apply except in the US.

Not entirely true. Here's but one web page describing laws that restrict individual and corporate action outside the US:
http://www.bu.edu/globalprograms/global-toolkit/getting-established/us-laws-abroad/

Also, certain parts of the IRS code apply to US citizens with foreign income, even if they are no longer US residents.

And, various laws regarding sex with underage minors, even when legal in the foreign country, still apply to US citizens when abroad.

Not surprisingly, children born to US citizens while abroad are eligible for US citizenship, by US law.

Here's another link with a more scholarly discussion of extra-territorial juristiction:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDIQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcorporatecompliance.org%2FContent%2FNavigationMenu%2FResources%2FLibrarymembersonly%2FUS_JurisdictionAbroad.pdf&ei=YyJyT4idOaT20gH-zom2AQ&usg=AFQjCNGOlnjQJ6uhrNRE243R7iDhYXy3FA

Here's a preview of another scholarly article:
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2203461?uid=3739696&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=47698810512577

My lay understanding is that generally, US laws do not apply abroad, but that should not be taken as a 100% certainty. Moreover, there are certain US laws which have been written that specifically claim extra-territorial jurisdiction.

Strangely enough, people who aren't mixing up average and peak efficiencies get wildly different results.

This seminal study in 1977 showed that kids who immerse themselves in the storylines of fantasy play outperform kids who play "real" games (like house or firefighters), kids who read and discuss fantasy, and kids who read and discuss "real" stories. I just talked to one of the co-authors, David Dixon, who now teaches at Missouri State, and he guessed that his study's results had something to do with helping kids both stretch their narrative imaginations and to disentangle the concepts "thought" from "action" (In young kids, thinking IS doing). So what I wonder is this: do video games WITHOUT storylines encourage kids to formulate their own? Or do games without storylines lose this narrative aspect altogether?

The use of deception in primates of many kinds is well documented: see

here or here.

It's a useful adaptation for social mammals, and far from unique to humans, let alone post-Babel humans.

The bicameral hypothesis is crap, by the way.