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and the scientist then asked "So why is it in the literature you're selling in the lobby?"

I don't find that particularly persuasive, do you? Are all books with one or more superseded theories or now former "facts" gathered up and destroyed immediately as soon as one part of it is out of date? There is a bit of a problem keeping textbooks up to date with current science. I seem to recall a recent story that space science is particularly bad off in that regard with many books being 30-40 years out of date in some important areas. I don't find it any surprise that vendors don't throw their inventory on bonfires if it is dated, but rather prefer to sell them to get their money back. That is before you get into the question of classics in a field. Some of the classics in my fields are timeless, others have been superseded but still offer valuable insights into thinking about the problems, or approaches to consider. No, I don't find that a persuasive point at all.

I suspect it's something like the reason physicists don't feel a need to have Time Cube proponentists and historians don't need holocaust deniers.

Not, that isn't it. The problem with your quip is that physicists that ascribe to ID still do real physics. Chemists that ascribe to ID still do real chemistry. Biologists that ascribe to ID still do real biology. Doctors that ascribe to ID still do real medicine. The time cube guy probably needs (needed?) medication and therapy. Holocaust deniers are popular in Iran, and various parts of the Middle East, but not so much in the West.

This scientist clearly believes in God, perhaps he is even a Creationist. I don't think you can argue he hasn't made a solid contribution to science. He isn't alone, not by a long shot.

Collins: Why this scientist believes in God

As the saying goes, you're entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts. If you don't deal in facts, science doesn't need you.

Well, that always is one of the questions, isn't it? What are the facts? And do they support the theory? Some scientists prefer only friendly reviewers, and like minded theories.

The famous German physicist Max Planck said, "A 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. " He also said, "Both Religion and science require a belief in God. For believers, God is in the beginning, and for physicists He is at the end of all considerations To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view. "

Journals can be discriminatory, or captured by a particular faction in a debate and exclude solid papers by those they disagree with. The science around "climate change" is not a shining model of scientific process even if you agree with the theory of man-made global warming.

Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?

. . . a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research”

Who? Who?

Who do you think? The Libyans!

Holy shit!

They wanted me to build them a drone, so I took their plutonium and, in turn, gave them a shoddy drone casing full of used pinball machine parts.

Who? Who?

Who do you think? The Libyans!

Holy shit!

Whether GP was joking or not, you have to wonder if the pharmas won't try something analogous to clawing public domain works back under copyright. Which, as any dipshit can tell you, should never happen. Except it does.

I'm sure that they'd love to(though TB is kind of a lousy disease as ROI potential goes. Virtually all the cases are in poor or marginal populations, so the customers tend to have only enough money to sporadically take drugs and develop resistant strains, and the first-world high rollers are negligible. Also, because the morbidity and mortality are so significant in poor countries, and the public health concern over drug resistance so great, a new TB drug would be an attractive target for generic production under the authorization of various uppity countries who don't understand that obeying American IP law is more important than their citizens' lives*shakes head*), I'm just not sure that they'd achieve much traction in a case like this. Unless therapeutic use does require some genuinely novel tweaks, the fact that synthesized vitamin C was big news in the early 1930s, and research on dietary sources was largely nailed down in the days when keeping the sailors on your man-o'-war from dying was important national security stuff, will probably mount a fairly stiff prior-art challenge.

Not following the news (retractions) much? That same audit targeted liberal groups with equal opportunity -- it did focus on organizations with political-sounding names, but didn't pick bones about which side of the fence that organization was on.

I'm sorry, but you are completely wrong.

IRS approved liberal groups while Tea Party in limbo

WASHINGTON -- In February 2010, the Champaign Tea Party in Illinois received approval of its tax-exempt status from the IRS in 90 days, no questions asked.

That was the month before the Internal Revenue Service started singling out Tea Party groups for special treatment. There wouldn't be another Tea Party application approved for 27 months.

In that time, the IRS approved perhaps dozens of applications from similar liberal and progressive groups, a USA TODAY review of IRS data shows.

As applications from conservative groups sat in limbo, groups with liberal-sounding names had their applications approved in as little as nine months. With names including words like "Progress" or "Progressive," the liberal groups applied for the same tax status and were engaged in the same kinds of activities as the conservative groups. ...

Lawmakers say IRS targeted dozens more conservative groups than initially believed

The IRS targeting of conservative groups is far broader than first reported, with nearly 500 organizations singled out for additional scrutiny, according to two lawmakers briefed by the agency.

IRS officials claimed on Friday that roughly 300 groups received additional scrutiny. Reps. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said Tuesday that the number has actually risen to 471. Further, they said it is "unclear" whether Tea Party and other conservative groups are being targeted to this day.

And the fact you were voted 5 interesting for being a bigot shows how absolutly worthless /. comments are.

Now for the deregulation TRUTH how it was the DNC that refuesed to let Bush add regulations to prevent the collapse. But then again the truth doesn't ever seem to line up with DNC talking points, so keep spewing your bigioted BS lies.

Whether GP was joking or not, you have to wonder if the pharmas won't try something analogous to clawing public domain works back under copyright. Which, as any dipshit can tell you, should never happen. Except it does.

We (in the US) are already there. Just go read the recent news. IRS/TEA Party/medical records seizures, DoJ/reporters, etc etc. It's not "ooh, shiny!" Hollywood, but what in the real world ever is? The results (and the violation, terror, and suffering of innocents) are the same.

Not following the news (retractions) much? That same audit targeted liberal groups with equal opportunity -- it did focus on organizations with political-sounding names, but didn't pick bones about which side of the fence that organization was on.

Re: they could just move their mail operation overseas with no US operatives.

they do it for taxes already, so why the fuck not...

Hate to break it to you, but they don't really move their money overseas for tax purposes. They only claim to move the money overseas. It's just a sham tax avoidance scheme. See the New York Times article entitled For U.S. Companies, Money âOffshoreâ(TM) Means Manhattan:

...

''The offshore companies are a fiction and the statement that the money is offshore is a fiction,'' said Edward D. Kleinbard, former staff director for the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. ''What they are asking for is a reward for having gamed the system.''

So they could claim that the servers are the diplomatic property of that imaginary land of Googylvania, couldn't they? Googylvania, that's my name for that concept, see also /. article about Google Island. Way, way, way beyond the reach of the USA laws.

But you forget that the point of this is not really to stop servicing the Law Enforcement community of the USA. It's just to put up the pretense of protesting at serving and servicing the interests of the spies and LEOs of the USA: mollify the sheeple customers into believing that "it's the bad old guvviment that's so mean and googa-woogle is so good and on your side, we even pwotest these national secuwity lettews!" Don't fall for it. Google is NOT on your side.

The article is a puff piece which ignores the massive amount of data lost through connection drops, forced restarts & reloads YouTube and many other sites cause/require, as well as the ever-increasing bandwidth necessary due to "cloud" services, software-as-a-service, growing page programming/scripting and third-party & indirect loads (predictive actions, agents, ads, iFrames, etc.).

http://nocera.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/17/the-gun-report-may-17-2013/

Etc.

Oh, hey, look, I found another one;

http://nocera.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/weekend-gun-report-may-17-19-2013/

No you are wrong.
"Many of our rules are violations of that first most basic right, pretty much anything that someone else thinks that you should do or not-do for your own good: rules about drugs, prostitution, abortion, doctor-assisted suicide, and yes, wearing clothes. "
Let's tear this apart one by one.

'rules about drugs"
No you are wrong. http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/human-biology/medical-quackery.htm#page=0 not to mention FDA testing of drugs for safety and effectiveness. You are probably talking about recreational drugs but even then you will want laws to keep them safe and more or less pure and not mixed with who knows what.

"abortion,"
No you are wrong. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/us/kermit-gosnell-abortion-doctor-found-guilty-of-murder.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 Even if you support abortion rights if you are not a total nut job you will want laws that make them safe like requiring a doctor perform them.

"prostitution"
No you are wrong. Even if you believe that prostituion should be legal you would want laws regulating the minimum age of the prositute and health checks of the workers.

"doctor-assisted suicide"
Yea what could go wrong with that. Again you would want laws to make sure that the patient understood and that they where not pressured into such a choice.

"wearing clothes"
Like hell! Don't you know that the only people that want to walk around naked are people that nobody wants to see naked?

This is all just extreme libertarian clap trap. It is as unworkable as anything Marx or Ayn Rand ever came up with. And just as with Marx and Rand it is too extreme and over simplified to be workable. What I am pointing out is that you are wrong. You really do not want to get ride of laws on those subjects. You want different laws that reflect your world view. There is nothing wrong with that just work within the system and change the laws and stop pretending you want to get rid of laws on those subjects because frankly they are needed.

There are not an insignificant number of cases where a normally responsible person becomes an irresponsible person,

When we're talking about irresponsible enough to commit homicide, yes, that is an insignificant number. (In terms of frequency; of course in personal terms any murder is highly significant to those, to friends and family of both the victim and, in a different sense, the murderer.)

Murder is something people work their way up to. 90% of murder suspects in Milwaukee in 2001 had a criminal record; the same proportion was found in NYC in 2003 through 2005. Keep in mind this is just guys (mostly, some women too) who got caught at previous crimes, more would have committed crimes and not been caught, and more would have displayed irresponsible but non-criminal behavior (the sort of stuff a good mental health system would catch).

The good citizen who suddenly snaps and kills is a favorite fictional trope, but bears little relationship to criminological reality.

Wow you really need to work on your reading comprehension. Richard Lindzen was one of the authors disputing that 97% consensus based on "surveys contained trivial polling questions". The link I supplied has nothing to do with surveys or polling. Lindzen was referring to another study. Please read first. By the way, it's ironic that you mention Lindzen because he agrees with the basic premise of climate change: 1) it's happening and 2) humans are a likely cause:

Dr. Lindzen accepts the elementary tenets of climate science. He agrees that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, calling people who dispute that point “nutty.” He agrees that the level of it is rising because of human activity and that this should warm the climate.

Lindzen however thinks that warming isn't a problem because the clouds would save us in a controversial "iris" theory which he admits had serious flaws.

Dr. Lindzen acknowledged that the 2009 paper contained "some stupid mistakes" in his handling of the satellite data.

Thanks for playing.

"At the end of the day no matter how the handful of people like Bill Gates became so rich, neither their wealth nor their income holds a candle to what governments throw around on a daily basis"

Warren Buffett seems to think differently. And he has some numbers to back it up.

" The Forbes 400, the wealthiest individuals in America, hit a new group record for wealth this year: $1.7 trillion... ...A huge tail wind from tax cuts has pushed us along. In 1992, the tax paid by the 400 highest incomes in the United States (a different universe from the Forbes list) averaged 26.4 percent of adjusted gross income. In 2009, the most recent year reported, the rate was 19.9 percent. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

The group’s average income in 2009 was $202 million — which works out to a “wage” of $97,000 per hour, based on a 40-hour workweek. (I’m assuming they’re paid during lunch hours.) Yet more than a quarter of these ultrawealthy paid less than 15 percent of their take in combined federal income and payroll taxes. Half of this crew paid less than 20 percent. And — brace yourself — a few actually paid nothing.

This outrage points to the necessity for more than a simple revision in upper-end tax rates, though that’s the place to start. I support President Obama’s proposal to eliminate the Bush tax cuts for high-income taxpayers..."

A Minimum Tax for the Wealthy - 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/opinion/buffett-a-minimum-tax-for-the-wealthy.html?_r=0

"it is impossible to have a dignified life on the official poverty line draws our attention to the appalling living conditions of the Indian poor"
http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/what-does-indias-poverty-line-actually-measure/

At Google Conference, Cameras Even in the Bathroom

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/17/at-google-conference-even-cameras-in-the-bathroom/

Ripples occur when there are rapid stops. A very gradual slowing down should really minimize the downstream effects, providing other drivers are paying attention and not following so closely that they have to slam on their brakes when the speed of the car in front of them decreases even the slightest.

Everyone seems to believe that, but it's not really true. Here's what some Japanese researchers found (watch the video):

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/those-inexplicable-traffic-jams/

This good enough for you?

It's good to see then taking the Muzzy threat seriously. And they needto:

Florida Man Charged With Plotting Terror Campaign in Name of Islam
Florida Terrorism Suspect Planned New York Attack, Feds Say
Hafiz Khan, Florida Imam, Convicted In Terror Case Of Aiding Pakistani Taliban
Witness Is Silent in Terror Probe

Even the NYTimes points out how the drug companies abuse their access to health care and prescription records: "Pills Tracked From Doctor to Patient to Aid Drug Marketing" in today's (2013-may-17) New York Times.
.
Here are some of the sad reasons that people have for wanting to look at your private health records:
1 - marketing: what can we sell to you? what disease do you have? what products will you need? will you buy more incontinence diapers? will you need special dietary restrictions, thus special types of food or vitamins? are you getting fatter and needing bigger clothes?
2 - risk analysis: what can we charge you more for in terms of insurance or job benefits? are you a smoker? did you already have miscarriages? did your momma miscarry? did your daddy have cancer? did you third cousin on your mother's side have tuberculosis? have you asked for an HIV test? are you a drug user? do you drink a lot? All of these would affect your life insurance costs and your health insurance costs and may even affect your credit worthiness... If you suddenly find out you have cancer, are you going to go on a purchasing binge knowing that you won't have to pay anything off? do they need to cut off your credit?
3 - associate analysis - do your partners/family members need to be sold things or marked as higher risk? is your daughter pregnant? is your grandmother dying? is half your family pregnant and the other half dying? (M*A*S*H episode recently, about Klinger always trying to get a visit to go home...)
4 - should you car insurance rates go up? were you diagnosed with diabetes, epilepsy, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, narcolepsy, fainting spells, heart disorders or attacks? stuff that could make you a risky driver or at risk of losing consciousness or driving recklessly means that they've got a reason for raising your rates!
5 - should they hire you? will the company's insurance rates go up if they hire you? do you have a disease? does your wife? your kids? are they likely to get sicker? is your wife pregnant? are you or other household members smokers or drinkers or drug users (all of whom become costly for insurance for small and large companies!)
6 - are you not one of us? pure unadulterated prejudice can rear its head! your abortion example for the employee, or their wife, or their daughter having an abortion, or even being raped? how dare they allow themselves to be raped! Do they have diseases that show they're unclean? VD? pregancies? miscarriages? drug use? a history of obesity? a history of mental illness, depression, suicide attempts? how else can we discriminate?
:>(
I agree with you. There ought not be any reason that anyone other than your doctors, nurses, hospitals, physical therapists, x-rays techs, pharmacists, etc., really needs to know your medical health records... yet somehow the insurance people and HR at your work get to know all about it as the bills flow through...

Target has apparently refined their algorithm for detecting pregnancy so finely that they had to tone it down - instead of sending a packet full of baby-related coupons, they only include one or two until you use them (which confirms that you haven't had a miscarriage or an abortion). They wouldn't spill the sauce, of course, but it apparently wasn't just when you stopped buying condoms and birth control pills and started buying pregnancy tests. Here is an article from the NYT.

The educated reader would realize that productivity increases aren't distributed equally across the workforce.

Once upon a time, they were
http://exopermaculture.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/526916_10150870575016275_36774245_n.jpg

Then things changed (the bottom half of this graphic)
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/01/13/opinion/13greenhousech/13greenhousech-popup-v4.png

"likely able to" is just conjecture. Try again with facts.
The numbers are out there, see if they support your hypothesis.

That's what you take from the last 30-40 years? We're much better off now than the mid-70s, when we had all those things plus gas lines!

You sure about that? This graph kind of contradicts your statement unless you are in the top 25%...

Google gets warrants to hand over data, just like everyone else. There are some differences however in how Google handles government requests.

1. Google tries to be very transparent about what requests they get from the government, and how much they are forced to hand over.
http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/government/

2. When George W. Bush asked for search data tied to IP addresses, all the major search provides just handed it over without a warrant and Google refused. Google's response was to go one step further and alter their policies to anonymize their logs even sooner to help protect their users.

3. Google has even considered moving data centers to the ocean to keep your private data away from government demands.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/googles-search-goes-out-to-sea/

The price was fixed because Apple had a deal that NOBODY could sell to the public at a price lower than they could. The collusion was between Apple and the individual publishers.

And Amazon had and still has almost the same clause - just worse, because in their case the price will stick at the lowest price for ever, making promos for non-Amazon stores impossible. http://feldmanfile.blogspot.de/2012/04/most-favored-nation-landmine.html http://paidcontent.org/2011/11/03/419-amazon-wont-pay-self-published-author-for-books-it-mistakenly-gave-away/ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/30/business/media/byliner-takes-buzz-bissingers-e-book-off-amazon.html?_r=2&smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto&

James Hansen perhaps is the most eminent proponent of that school of thought. Here is one example. He says, "If this sounds apocalyptic, it is."

. But, we're talking about the chicken little global warming narrative here, so

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/business/insurers-stray-from-the-conservative-line-on-climate-change.html?_r=1&

Insurers, whose money comes from making a valid judgment about risk, are also now weighing in on the damage being wrought by GW. But, I guess to you, they're just "chicken littles."

What's so interesting about stupid cunts like you is how even when the evidence is literally raining down on your heads, you still deny it. Literally as the proof you demand comes into view, you insist that a different proof is required, or something. We in the real world call it "moving the goalposts." I'm not sure what you call it.

But, I guess you can't fix fucking stupid, can you, Emag? I mean, I'm not sure if you've tried, but trust me, you haven't succeeded. You're godawful fucking dumb, and it shows.

But you're right, we do think so little of mass shootings that we refuse to regulate the access to firearms. And we are absolutely correct to do so. 100 deaths per year in a country of 300 million is negligable.

Although mass shootings get all the headlines, controlling access to firearms will save a whole lot more than 100 lives per year. Most of the savings will come from reduced accidental deaths and suicides.

There is a widespread belief that having a gun in the house makes you safer: this is not true.

In the 1990s, a team headed by Arthur Kellermann of Emory University looked at all injuries involving guns kept in the home in Memphis, Seattle and Galveston, Tex. They found that these weapons were fired far more often in accidents, criminal assaults, homicides or suicide attempts than in self-defense. For every instance in which a gun in the home was shot in self-defense, there were seven criminal assaults or homicides, four accidental shootings, and 11 attempted or successful suicides. source

(other sources along those lines)

There is also a widespread belief a person who dies from suicide would have done so no matter what method: this also is not true. Most suicide attempts are impulsive acts, and most are unsuccessful. An impulse act with pills or slit wrists is unlikely to succeed: it takes time, the person may have second thoughts, and usually recovers through medical and psychological treatment. A suicide attempt by a gun is much, much more likely to succeed. If that suicidal person did not have ready access to a gun, and had to resort to a different method, the changes are good that most (i.e., more than 50%) of those people would still be with us today.

Although sometimes the torture is indeed deliberate policy. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/13/guantanamo-bay-hunger-strike-forced-feeding

On a related note, can you post any facts on whether the CIA had or has a policy of followup drone strikes on rescuers/funerals and/or of treating multiple civilian casualties as acceptable if it means another dead terrorist? E.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/world/asia/19pstan.html?_r=1&ref=world

I'm more than beginning to have the disturbing sense that the US government/military has stared too long into the abyss. Yeah, we know the bad guys are evil. Flying airliners packed with civilians into buildings is pretty damn obviously evil. But it's becoming less obvious how good those claiming to be the good guys still are.

We can't even successfully prevent all idiots from driving at .08

I'm not a professional researcher, but I question their results. I read a different article which said that .05 BAC levels would save 200-300 lives a year.
Some figures:
Annual traffic deaths: ~33k
Portion that are 'alcohol related': 1/3rd, about 10k total
Number of lives estimated to be saved: 500-800 per year, 5-8% of current alcohol deaths.
Extra risk: .05 is 38% over sober .08 169%

Already there's all sorts of activities that will raise the risk of you having an accident more than 38%. The vast majority of the fatal DUI accidents I've read about are for people with BACs north of .24, or triple the current limit.

Meanwhile, I predict that prosecuting people for .05 DUIs is going to be expensive. Most will try to fight it; you're getting into the range where a breath test might not be accurate enough. I question whether the the cost to society for enforcing the rule might not exceed the cost of implementing it.

Realistically you'd be better off somehow stopping the 'should be dead with a BAC that high' people from driving. A bit tough given how creative some of them get - permanently 'borrowing' a friend or relative's vehicle, secretly buying a used car without the mandated interlock, etc...

Freeman Dyson's scientific knowledge in this area is exactly nil.

Dyson on Dyson, from:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

"It's always possible Hansen could turn out to be right," he says of the climate scientist. "If what he says were obviously wrong, he wouldn't have achieved what he has. But Hansen has turned his science into ideology. He's a very persuasive fellow and has the air of knowing everything. He has all the credentials. I have none. I don't have a Ph.D. He's published hundreds of papers on climate. I haven't. By the public standard he's qualified to talk and I'm not. But I do because I think I'm right. I think I have a broad view of the subject, which Hansen does not. I think it's true my career doesn't depend on it, whereas his does. I never claim to be an expert on climate. I think it's more a matter of judgement than knowledge."

The bottom line is this Dyson, like a lot of academics from his time, is an attention seeking machine who longs to be relevant and see his name in print once again; thus his trolling of slashdot (!!!) for some love and attention.

He's going to be long dead by the time the full gravity of his malfeasance becomes manifest to those that follow him - a fact he's very acutely of.

Excerpted without comment from

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2007/08/15/201772/freeman-dyson-climate-crackpot/?mobile=nc

As a physicist, I have never been a big fan of Freeman Dyson. He was, after all, one of the "geniuses" pushing Project Orion- the absurdly impractical idea of creating a rocket ship powered by detonating nuclear bombs-- I kid you not!

Dyson has written a new book, A Many Colored Glass, that you shouldn't waste your time and money on, as this extract on global warming makes clear. Dyson has basically joined the famous confusionist camp with Michael Crichton and Bill Gray. You can read a good debunking of Dyson here. I'll add my two cents.

Dyson says many things that are just plain wrong: "There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global."

Uhh, no. The warming is global -as every set of data makes clear- that's why it's called global warming.

He says the "fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated" because he is certain the climate models do not reflect reality. I agree they don't reflect reality - but that leads me to the opposite conclusion. Dyson fails to ask whether the simplifications and omissions in climate models lead them to overestimate or underestimate climate impacts. So far, they have underestimated things like Arctic ice loss, mass loss of the great ice sheets, and sea-level rise. They don't model many feedbacks very well, and we know today that most feedbacks are amplifying.

No nonsense essay would be complete without a nonsense solution. He believes "the problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem of land management" and that the entire climate problem can be solved by increasing topsoil:

We do not know whether intelligent land-management could increase the growth of the topsoil reservoir by four billion tons of carbon per year, the amount needed to stop the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Actually we kinda do know. The best data suggest we are losing billions of tons of topsoil each year. A major effort will be required just to stop that loss
rate from increasing sharply. Indeed, global warming itself is projected to cause both increased flooding, which washes away topsoil, and increased droughts, which destroy topsoil.

The entire essay is riddled with the kind of mistakes and dubious assertions we saw in Crichton's novel. One final point. Dyson asserts:

They [climate models]

NY Times Editor Margaret Sullivan quoting Robert Heinlein.

http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/transparency-secrecy-and-retaliation-emerge-as-major-issues-in-benghazi-coverage/

``The failures of government transparency, too,
cross party lines. Rooted in political expediency,
those failures of transparency know no color,
neither red nor blue. And they need to be pointed
out and resisted. As author Robert A. Heinlein
wrote, ``Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.' ''

(my thanks to Danny Burstein for bringing this to my attention or usent:rec.arts.sf.written.)

I don't know where you're getting this stuff. I know you posted some interesting theoreticals from some academics that are funded by green initiatives and alternative energy subsidies. But that's obviously biased and still theoretical.

Actual experiments and initiatives, which you seem to be citing, actually have had the opposite results. The European initiative was plagued by corruption, cronyism, and even without that caused increases in electricity costs. That's to be expected. Experience has shown that new taxes, even when the attempt is made, are never used to offset costs for consumers. Instead the beneficiaries are bloated government bureaucracies and those they favor, and the top-tier private interests. That's what happened in Europe.

If you're referring specifically to the RGGI states in the Northeast, that a Cap & Trade scam. It's an Agenda 21 scheme that benefits wealthy investment firms and supported by politicians because they get revenue out of it. The claims they make read like they are creating free money out of thin air, but of course it's coming from consumers, and they suffer because of it. It's not a market, it's a market intervention, and a destructive one. New Hampshire has been one of the big losers, with rates going up more than the other states, primarily because they already had more energy efficiencies in place and don't benefit as much by investing in more. As with all top-down interventionist schemes, this one will be a long-term failure even with the appearance of short-term benefits.

You can tell what's happening with this if you look at the recent auctions. They've only managed to sell about half of the emission credits available. That means traders aren't making their money, so of course now they want to lower the cap, hoping for even higher prices.

He was trying to use patent law to void a contract. The ruling clearly states he would not found himself in trouble if he was using the seeds for his own use, but instead he bought seeds counting on the fact that some would have the anti-Round up gene.

Read the NYT article http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/business/monsanto-victorious-in-genetic-seed-case.html?_r=0

Even if the farmer is technically a businessperson it's still clear that the SCOTUS ruled in favor of the large corporation (at the expense of everyone else), as they're now wont to do:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/business/pro-business-decisions-are-defining-this-supreme-court.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

I believe this is the news article you're looking for.

2007, around $74 billion was spent on corrections. The total number of inmates in 2007 in federal, state, and local lockups was 2,419,241. That comes to around $30,600 per inmate. In 2005, it cost an average of $23,876 dollars per state prisoner. State prison spending varied widely, from $45,000 a year in Rhode Island to $13,000 in Louisiana. $4,020 is the basic cost of raising each child per year as estimated by the Department of Health and Human Services for 2013, whether there is one child or many children. The total basic cost of raising a child from birth to age 18 is by their estimates $389,670, based on the 30 year average inflation rate of 3% increasing the $4,020 annual cost every year. According to Globalissues.org, "Almost half the world — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day." This statistic includes children. Using $2.50 a day, the cost is roughly US$900 for raising a child for a year, and US$16,500 for raising a child from birth to age 17 As per the cost of public education spending Colorado, for instance ranks ninth nationally in "quality" of education but spent an average of $9,155 per student in 2009, putting it among the 10 states spending the least per pupil. Wyoming though ranked 29th in quality spending the most averaging $18,068 per student. Alaska, ranked 41st for its education quality, spent an average of $16,174 per student. Overall, the U.S. spent an average of $11,665 per student. Prison stats Sources: http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p08.pdf http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28cnd-prison.html?_r=0 http://www.pewstates.org/uploadedFiles/PCS_Assets/2008/one%20in%20100.pdf Education stats sources: http://www.nationaljournal.com/thenextamerica/education/analysis-how-much-states-spend-on-their-kids-really-does-matter-20121016

obama didnt do shit up here when sandy hit last year, it was bloomberg and christie who took care of us.

  bush fucked up as president, alot but obama makes him look like a saint.

You sound just like every other Obama hating right winger I've ever heard.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/opinion/krugman-sandy-versus-katrina.html?_r=0

Bush was an absolute idiot. You can't make any reasonable comparison.

Are they equally concerned about failures of the Chinese wall between, say, the corporate advisory arm of a bank and the investment division?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/weekinreview/13segal.html

One suspects not.

Ask a hard core libertarian what they think of a minimum wage

That's a fiscal, not social, issue. Why would a libertarian want to be against hiring teenagers, which is the real-world effect of a high minimum wage? Not everyone needs to live on what they are paid, high minimum wages ignore this fact.

Exactly the opposite actually: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/the-minimum-wage-and-teenage-jobs/

or government provided social services

Again a fiscal, not social, issue. Why can you not be fully for abortion without wanting the government to fund them?

Yes social services are never a social issue.

It's a fiscal issue to you but it's a social issue to the society and everyone who lives in it, even if they are too narrow minded to see it.

It would be better that teens be well educated about sex with free access to birth control, which I suppose you would also contest due to the associated cost, unless you're a full on idiot like Sarah Palin that believes that telling kids not to have sex works.

Private groups have proven they can do a far better job of providing social services than the government.

No they haven't. They can be more financially efficient on a small scale but they cannot provide the scope needed to cover the entire population.

Perhaps you would rather live in a country without government provided social services like any third world country where only the wealthy have access to education and medicine, where diseases killed off long ago in our society by social (read free) medicine still run rampant?

go through all the steps that led up to the recent factory collapse in Bangladesh

Corruption is the base of that more than anything else. Libertarians are not "for" corruption thank you very much, and also "thanks" for using 600 dead factory workers as leverage for your arguments.

Of course without government regulation there is no need for corruption. The result would be the same, however.

The point of the original poster was that without government regulation such catastrophes would be widespread as there would be no regulation and no government oversight allowing such business owners to build or put their employees to work in shoddy and unsafe factories to save money.

instead it's just pointing out that they are far too naive to understand what evil

It seems we are far less naive than you.

If you had something to back up your propaganda then perhaps I would agree with you.

The physical chemist's point was that the physicist was thinking the wrong way about the problem: at the atomic level, rather than the chemical level. In fact, freezing CO2, while physically possible, is not economically feasible. But there are many carbon extraction systems that can use solar power and/or convection, in combination with CO2 absorbents, to extract CO2 at a reasonable cost. For example, early this year the NY Times reported on a Bill Gates-funded project to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere that aims to lower the cost to $100/ton, which is a reasonable cost that could be borne by industry.

But that cost should only be incurred once it's proven that CO2 does indeed cause global temperature increases, and that the CO2 is human-generated. Right now those are not proven facts. The suspicion of CO2 as a warming agent has been based on the correlation of CO2 concentrations with temperature, but no cause-and-effect has been proven. It could be that CO2 changes result from temperature changes, rather than vice-versa.

I've got a neural network system that has silicon neurons with sigmoid functions that operate in analog. They're not digital. Digital basically means you round such signals to 1 or 0, but my system's activation levels vary due to heat dissipation and other effects. In a complex system like this quantum uncertainty comes into play, especially when the system is observing the real world... Not all Robots are Deterministic. I train these systems like I would any other creature with a brain, and I can then rely on them to perform their training as well as I can trust my dog to bring me my slippers or my cat to use the toilet and flush, which is to say: They're pretty reliable, but not always 100% predictable, like any other living thing. However, unlike a pet who has a fixed size brain I can arrange networks of neural networks in a somewhat fractal pattern to increase complexity and expand the mind without having to retrain the entire thing each time the structure changes.

FYI: I'm on the robots' and cyborgs' side of the war already, if it comes to that. What with us being able to ever more clearly image the brain, and with good approximations for neuron activity, and faster and faster machines, I think we'll certainly have near sentient, or sentient machine intelligences rather soon. Also, You can just use real living brain cells hooked up to a robotic chassis -- Such a cyborg is certainly alive. Anyone who doubts cybernetic systems can have fear, or any other emotion is simply an ignorant racist. I have a dog that's deathly afraid of lightning, lightning struck the window in a room she was in. It rattled her so bad she takes Valium to calm down now when it rains... Hell, even rats have empathy.

I have to remote log into one of my machine intelligence's systems to turn it off for backup / maintenance because it started acting erratically, creating a frenzy of responses for seemingly no reason, when I'd sit at the chair near its server terminal -- Imagine being that neural network system. Having several web cams as your visual sensors, watching a man sit at a chair, then instantly the lighting had changed, all the sea of information you monitor on the Internet had been instantly populated with new fresh data, even the man's clothes had changed. This traumatic event happened enough that the machine intellect would begin essentially anticipating the event when I sat at the terminal, that being the primary thing that would happen when I did sit there. It was shaken, almost as bad as my poor dog who's scared of lightning... You may not call it fear, but what is an irrational response in anticipation of trauma but fear?

Any sufficiently complex interaction is indistinguishable from sentience, because that's what sentience IS. Human brains are electro chemical cybernetic systems. Robots are made out of matter just like you. Their minds operate on cycles of electricity, gee, that's what a "brain wave" is in your head too... You're more alike than different. A dog, cat or rat is not less alive than you just because it has a less complex brain. They may have less intelligence, and that is why we don't treat them the same as humans... However, what if a hive mind of rat-brain robots having multiple times the neurons of any single human wanted to vote and be called a person, and exhibited other traits a person might: "Yess massta, I-iz just wanna learn my letters and own land too," it might say, mocking you for your ignorance. Having only a fraction of its brain power you and the bloke in TFA would both be simple mindless automatons from its vantage point? -- Would it really be more of a person than you are? Just because it has a bigger, more complex, brain by comparison, would that make you less of a person than it? Should such things have more rights tha

NYT article about "scientific-article SPAM," which is a related topic:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/health/for-scientists-an-exploding-world-of-pseudo-academia.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

FTFA:

Scientistsâ(TM) work follows a consistent pattern. They apply for grants, perform their research, and publish the results in a journal. The process is so routine it almost seems inevitable. But what if itâ(TM)s not the best way to do science?

- yeah, that's a false choice.

Private companies do science all the time because they need to push their knowledge forward to stay competitive.

By the way, who is preventing any scientist from publishing his papers anyway he or she likes at all? Who is standing in their way just throwing the stuff on some free Internet site, like, I don't know this or even this silly site?

http://www.justice.gov/usao/nye/pr/2013/2013may09.html

Over the course of approximately 10 hours, casher cells in 24 countries executed approximately 36,000 transactions worldwide and withdrew about $40 million from ATMs. From 3 p.m. on February 19 through 1:26 a.m. on February 20, the defendants and their co-conspirators withdrew approximately $2.4 million in nearly 3,000 ATM withdrawals in the New York City area.

2904 withdrawals, not ATMs. About 10 hours, not EXACTLY 10 hours.
Also, it's 8 persons with 12 accounts per person. All they needed to cover was about 30 ATMs.
Which comes out to about 20 minutes per ATM, meaning that each TEAM (i.e. at least one to withdraw the money, one to drive the car and keep lookout) had about 8 minutes to get from one ATM to the next.

Good critical thinking on your part though. Just too much noise in the signal.

Yes, crazy. Yes, genocidal.

When he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, Las Casas says, "there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it...." Thus began the history, five hundred years ago, of the European invasion of the Indian settlements in the Americas. ...
Past the elementary and high schools, there are only occasional hints of something else. Samuel Eliot Morison, the Harvard historian, was the most distinguished writer on Columbus, the author of a multivolume biography, and was himself a sailor who retraced Columbus's route across the Atlantic. In his popular book Christopher Columbus, Mariner, written in 1954, he tells about the enslavement and the killing: "The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide."

That is on one page, buried halfway into the telling of a grand romance. In the book's last paragraph, Morison sums up his view of Columbus:

"He had his faults and his defects, but they were largely the defects of the qualities that made him great-his indomitable will, his superb faith in God and in his own mission as the Christ-bearer to lands beyond the seas, his stubborn persistence despite neglect, poverty and discouragement. But there was no flaw, no dark side to the most outstanding and essential of all his qualities-his seamanship."

One can lie outright about the past. Or one can omit facts which might lead to unacceptable conclusions. Morison does neither. He refuses to lie about Columbus. He does not omit the story of mass murder; indeed he describes it with the harshest word one can use: genocide.

But he does something else-he mentions the truth quickly and goes on to other things more important to him. Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discovery which, when made, might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer. To state the facts, however, and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it's not that important-it should weigh very little in our final judgments; it should affect very little what we do in the world.

Howard Zinn, The People’s History of the United States

Among the Taino people of Hispaniola, Columbus decreed a system of tribute, requiring each adult to submit a specified quantity of gold, on pain of death. But he was also fervently determined to spread the Christian faith. Christianize or exploit? Convert or enslave? The two goals were plainly antithetical. For a time, Columbus hoped to resolve the quandary by enslaving the diabolical Caribs and converting the more benign peoples. But what did conversion even mean? A priest wrote that “force and craft” were required to impose Christianity on the Indians, but there was little hope that they would observe the rites after their overlords had left.

The Less Than Heroic Christopher Columbus, IAN W. TOLL,The Less Than Heroic Christopher Columbus

I'm just taking the first things I find on Google, this shit isn't hard to find

I think it was Goethe who once said "Tell me what a man spends his time doing, and I shall tell you his occupation". We have plenty of "actors" and "artists" who are just waiting tables until they get their big break. If you spend your time designing and implementing software, you are a programmer. It is once again growing extremely rare to find someone who spends their time programming who is not well-paid for it, (if they choose to be). If you find yourself between jobs, contribute to some open-source projects. Keep programming, and get your name out there. The robots will notice you.

As far as the intellectual quality of the boycott, I guess Stephen Hawking hasn't sat around and thought about it as deeply as you have.

Seeing as he is now being accused of hypocrisy over his continued use of Israeli technology, I'm guessing he didn't think about it very much. Great physicist, I enjoy his work, and fortunately he seems to bounce back from his previous mistakes. I'm sure he'll bounce back from this mistake too.