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Reality seems to contradict you. The US healthcare system is neither cheap (most expensive on the planet) nor efficient/good (usually towards the bottom of the list when ranking 1st world countries). In contrast, many of the cheapest and best systems for healthcare are either national healthcare systems (e.g., Canada and UK) or hybridized systems (e.g., the Netherlands).

So the lawsuit that Xerox brought against Apple says it wasn't stolen? http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/24/business/most-of-xerox-s-suit-against-apple-barred.html I think those who believe it wasn't stolen are morons.

Both pictures are clearly infringing on Louboutin's trademark on "red". Not a particular shade, or a particular usage. Just, you know, red.

Exactly what I was going to say. Comcast has already started buying up chunks of the traditional media. They're not the company you wanted to include on that list.

http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/et-tu-minnesota-another-law-proposes-making-factory-farm-photography-illegal.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/us/14video.html
http://animalrights.about.com/b/2011/03/23/bills-to-ban-undercover-factory-farming-videos-moving-ahead-in-iowa-and-florida.htm
http://www.dvafoto.com/2011/03/two-us-states-move-to-outlaw-unauthorized-photos-of-farming-operations/
http://www.silha.umn.edu/news/Summer2011/StatesConsiderBanningUndercoverRecordingatAgriculturalOperations.html
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/03/in-the-past-decade-modern/

Did you read this article in the nytimes last week: It was really eye opening. The summary is that chinese manufacturers or electronics are no longer just cheaper, they are way more flexible: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general

Some pretty big holes in your thesis there guy. For example the US is still the biggest manufacturing nation in the world.

It's also second only to China in exports, and is currently enjoying job growth despite popular misconceptions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/business/us-manufacturing-is-a-bright-spot-for-the-economy.html

http://business.time.com/2011/03/10/can-china-compete-with-american-manufacturing/

Perhaps this link is what you were thinking of (mentioned by another poster above you - credit goes to him).

It would fit a general trend...

Could they have just manufactured the iPhone in the USA?

Is that crazy?

1. No. The cost difference is much, much higher. 65 USD/phone has been mentioned - about 2.5 billion USD just last quarter.
2. More importantly, the skills needed don't exist and you have a manufacturing ecosystem in the area - almost all the things in the iPhone are made there too, making logistics[1] much easier. Also, using iSlaves adds tremendous flexibility
3. Apple transformed the mobile market with the iPhone - just look at phones before and after. Protecting as much as possible of this - while taking advantage of other transformations being available RAND - is what they want. The lawsuits is about stopping companies copying Apple, not about getting a share like Microsoft is happy doing.

[1] Logistics is where Apple really makes their money. Few products, little shelf time, no inventory. The actual product is a premium product at a premium price, true - but that costs in build quality and support as well. By keeping few product lines, reusing the same components and being the masters of supply chain management their profits go from "OK" to "incredible". Just witness how much trouble others have in matching the iPad price.

Before the treatment, the woman with Stargardt’s was able to see the motion of a hand being waved in front of her but could not read any letters on an eye chart. Twelve weeks after the treatment, she was able to read five of the biggest letters on the eye chart with the treated eye, corresponding to 20/800 vision, according to the paper.

Ms. Freeman, [another woman] who lives in Laguna Beach, Calif., went to 20/320 from 20/500 vision six weeks after the treatment.

When people say "ultimately as fast as C++" they always mean "for the idiom/paradigm we wish to carry forward". There's no language out there "as fast as C++" across the board for everything you can write in C++.

The implied retort: Well of course not, nobody would invent such a stupid language from scratch, combining such a disgusting mishmash of paradigms.

C++ syntactic morass: tired
underlying C++ conceptual model: pretty good, accounting for dog years
Racial purity: MIA

Survival's Ick Factor

At the end of the day, C++ keeps us united.

How about Antigua? It's hard to imagine a situation where the local government would be less friendly with US interests on the subject and they've even got international blessing from the rest of the world to explicitly violate US copyrights.

While the court did rule 9-0 that the tracking was too extensive and had to be thrown out, the court split 5-4 on the reasoning and scope of the ruling. The majority opinion held that the tracking was invalidated by the fact that police used the defendant's private property (his car), in violation of the 4th amendment. This largely sidesteps the much broader questions about stake: police use of GPS tracking in cellphones, camera networks backed by face/vehicle/license plate recogniztion software, etc. The minority opinion sought to invalidate the tracking on more broad grounds such as the duration (one month), continuous nature, expectation of privacy in the modern age, etc. But, being the minority opinion, it doesn't exactly have the same force behind it. Their opinion, however, is likely to form a blueprint for how these things can get argued going forward. It is certain that these issues will come up again and again in the Court.

More information and explanation of the ruling can be found at the NYTimes, wikipedia, and the court's opinion text (PDF).

I am glad this decision came down from the Supreme Court. I am also glad to find it here already on the news page at /. .

I am providing a link to the NY Times article on this same subject it is more informative IMHO.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/us/police-use-of-gps-is-ruled-unconstitutional.html

From the NY Times link above by Adam Liptak
Though the ruling was limited to physical intrusions, the opinions in the case collectively suggested that a majority of the justices are prepared to apply broad Fourth Amendment privacy principles unrelated to such intrusions to an array of modern technologies, including video surveillance in public places, automatic toll collection systems on highways, devices that allow motorists to signal for roadside assistance and records kept by online merchants.

Further into the article are the juicy bits. I paste them here for you /.ers who are RTFA imparied.
Justice Sotomayor joined the majority opinion, agreeing that many questions could be left for another day “because the government’s physical instruction on Jones’s jeep supplies a narrower basis for decision.”

But she seemed to leave little doubt that she would have joined Justice Alito’s analysis had the issue he addressed been the exclusive one presented in the case.

“Physical intrusion is now unnecessary to many forms of surveillance,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. In the case of G.P.S. devices, she wrote, “I would ask whether people reasonably expect that their movements will be recorded and aggregated in a manner that enables the government to ascertain, more or less at will, their political and religious beliefs, sexual habits, and so on.”

She went on to suggest that “it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties.”

“People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries, and medications they purchase to online retailers,” she wrote. “I for one doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the government of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last week, or month, or year.”

Justice Alito listed other “new devices that permit the monitoring of a person’s movements” that fit uneasily with traditional Fourth Amendment privacy analysis.

“In some locales,” he wrote, “closed-circuit television video monitoring is becoming ubiquitous. On toll roads, automatic toll collection systems create a precise record of the movements of motorists who choose to make use of that convenience. Many motorists purchase cars that are equipped with devices that permit a central station to ascertain the car’s location at any time so that roadside assistance may be provided if needed and the car may be found if it is stolen.

“Perhaps most significant, cellphones and other wireless devices now permit wireless carriers to track and record the location of users— and as of June 2011, it has been reported, there were more than 322 million wireless devices in use in the United States.”

I'm not a physicist, and there isn't complete agreement on this issue anyway, but I'm pointing to these:
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/03/nyregion/connecticut-is-first-state-to-bar-hand-held-radar-guns.html
http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/radiofrequencyradiation/fnradpub.html#results1

And you can ask someone who works with microwave communication what the known dangers are. If the EM spectrum is arranged in order of danger, then IR would be more dangerous than microwave, not less.

Maybe you should think about it some more.

That clause is designed to prevent situations like what recently happened in the Ukraine, where leaders of opposition factions in the government are arrested:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/09/world/europe/09ukraine.html

False.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/23/dining/23pout.html

Ahlquist demanded the removal of religious symbols from her public high school and succeeded in court. Yes, that ruffled some feathers, but the courts upheld religious freedoms, and that's all it can do.

In Europe, she couldn't have been lynched for this because European governments and courts unabashedly promote Christianity in schools and wouldn't have forced the school to remove the symbol in the first place. And the Italian foreign minister unabashedly praised the decision and said that it was just what "the mob" wanted.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/19/world/europe/19briefs-ART-Crucifix.html?_r=1&ref=crossesandcrucifixes

The last I heard, the Iranians claimed to have hijacked the GPS and told it to land within their borders, and the U.S. claimed it veered off-course and crashed

I heard that also.

Something close to that explanation seems feasible, based on what I've read. Perhaps they managed to jam the control signal, but had a hard time calculating GPS interference to correctly guide the aircraft. (Maybe they learned what channels to jam using intel based on a nuisance virus?) I don't have access to the protocols that govern autonomous drone control in the event of communication failure, so I don't know. There may be some poor Iranian geek explaining to the head chopper in charge why he shot off his mouth to the press, or maybe press reports are innacurate.

I think, based on the Iranian propaganda the BBC reported, which hid the landing gear behind bunting, the drone landed hard at best, and most likely crashed. Iran has falsified images previously.

Either way, we need to get better at this stuff or terrorists win.

Then you might have stopped 20 years ago.
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/01/world/vatican-science-panel-told-by-pope-galileo-was-right.html

OK, you've asked for references, which isn't unreasonable. Let's try a few facts from the other side, then.

First, as I said before, old ways of thinking don't necessarily apply to the new digital world, where distribution and/or manufacturing costs can be 0, or negligible.

The marginal cost of distribution can be near zero, for sure. The fixed costs, however, certainly aren't.

The real cost of Avatar, probably the most profitable movie of all time and with no big-ticket stars to pay, was somewhere around $500,000,000 according to the New York Times. The accounts have done their thing, but it looks like it made somewhere around double that in real profit.

The most profitable computer game of all times is Grand Theft Auto IV, which Wikipedia claims took over 1000 people and more than three and a half years to complete, with a total cost estimated at approximately $100 million. It made an order of magnitude more in gross revenues, but by the time you knock out the cuts for distribution channels, marketing expenses, tax, etc. the real profit is only a modest fraction of that.

Both of these productions were spectacularly successful in commercial terms, setting records, but they still only made a fairly small multiple of their cost in profit, and someone still had to foot the 9-figure price tag to produce and market them for that to happen. And remember that we are talking about literally the best case here, the most commercially successful such products yet released. Most products will never be anything like this successful, and plenty do lose money.

Secondly, Our society does not necessarily reward producing value with money. lottery winners, heirs, people on welfare etc. Having money by no means you have produced or contributed something useful.

Sure, there are exceptions to the rule. Some people get into positions where they can write their own cheque with someone else's money. Some people invest a small amount for a chance to make it big and it pays off. (Of course, many more invest small amounts and get nothing back; no lottery is a net win for the punters.) Some people play economic games with bits on computers that never had real money behind them. We all know how those things have turned out.

But most real money actually flowing around the economy is not like that. It's down to people working to earn a living, and then enjoying spending what they earned. That's why governments get very worried when the economy turns bad, as it is at the moment, and everyone starts paying down their debts or hoarding savings rather than spending just at the time when more spending it needed to get the economy moving again.

At the end of the day, any way you dress it up, someone is spending real time and money to produce this content. If someone else is enjoying that content but doesn't contribute anything in return, that's a one-sided bargain. I don't see how to back that argument up with "sources"; it's an appeal to basic human decency and sense of fair play.

It's It's legal in Switzerland

It's It's legal in Canada

It's It's legal in The Netherlands

Their creative and consumption economies are not impacted by piracy, as that was often the reason to make it legal in the first place.

Hold on a minute, please.

The Swiss decided very recently not to change their laws regarding downloading of copyright content for personal use, based on a report that basically said that while their own economy wasn't suffering because of it, big media companies elsewhere were taking the real hit and should suck it up and adapt (without specifying how). In other words, they acknowledged that someone was losing out big time, but it wasn't in their country and meant their own people could spend more of their entert

>> "I remain similarly unimpressed by the blind stereotypes you put out. Human existence is far more, and I repeat this, far more important to me than the existence of a certain number of species that are specialized to a very particular environment and can barely hold on."

Well, yes, it's obvious where your priorities are. And if it were a question of "our survival or theirs", I'd choose ours. But that isn't the choice we face, not by a long shot. The choice is actually between "their survival" and "our making a few mildly inconvenient changes to the way we do things." So again, yes, I consider your attitude pathologically selfish.

>> "Further, the people who complain about mass extinctions are very capable, just on their own, of moving species around so that the plant or slow animal that can only tolerate certain conditions can live a little distance away where those conditions still exist."

So, I'm supposed to devote my life to tranquilizing and capturing woodland creatures so as not to trample on your inalienable right to use incandescent light bulbs and to pay 5c/kWH for the electricity to power them? Please explain to me why I should have to clean up your messes for you. Why is it fair that I should pay to prevent the damage that your choices inflict on the broader ecosystem?

Introducing a species into a new environment isn't a quick or simple process. The way you're describing it reeks of scientific ignorance of the "I don't understand it so it can't possibly be hard" variety. Did you know that reintroducing wolves to the Yellowstone area cost $200K-$1M per wolf? And we're supposed to transplant every single plant or animal in the entire ecosystem a few hundred miles north, so that you don't have to insulate your house? I don't know whether I'm more in shock of your ignorance or your laziness.

>> "A lot of this sounds like "coming to the nuisance" where the externality is created because someone built near an existing coal mine."

A couple of points here: California's air quality is made significantly worse by coal burned in China. So where exactly were these people supposed to move to avoid the burden of being "near" a coal mine? Iceland?

In the same vein, during the summer, half of Maryland's ozone pollution comes from out of state sources. This line of reasoning ignores just how difficult it is to avoid the pollution of others.

But even if we assumed that the coal plant was there first, why does that make it reasonable to pin the costs on the person moving in? Say I have a thousand acres of land that I'm considering putting residential housing on. But it's downwind from a coal plant. By operating the way they do, say that every person who moves into my planned neighborhood incurs $500/year in medical/cleaning/bottled water/whatever costs. As a landowner, my land is therefore less valuable than it otherwise would be. The coal mine is making my land less valuable.

Or, to put it another way, if your house is adjacent to my empty lot, and your dog craps on said empty lot, when I decide to build a house you don't have an easement for your dog to crap on my lawn.

Regardless of who ultimately pays the costs, shouldn't these costs be subtracted from the economic benefits of "cheap, abundant coal (TM)"?

"A similar situation occurs with the cost of monitoring. This cost should be borne by the party that wants the monitoring, namely, the taxpayer. I don't even consider that an externality since it is not a cost imposed by fossil fuel burning, but by politicians and bureaucrats allegedly acting on behaft of the public."

That makes perfect sense, in some make believe world where the stuff coming out of the smokestacks smells like fresh pine and cannot be linked to any negative human or environmental effects. In the real world, those who do the damage (and profit mightily from doing that damage) should be responsi

Fox News reports is reporting that although Tepco can't see the fuel because of steam in the containment area, and although they can't find the current water level, the internal temperature of 112F qualifies as proof that the "cold shutdown" has been successful.

The other point of view at the washington post is that if they can't see the fuel, it has broken completely through the containment system, and "Given that steam forms when water boils this is an indication that the reactor is not in cold shutdown." Also "If the reactors are “cold”, it may be because most of the hot radioactive fuel has leaked out."

The New York Times pointed out last month: A former nuclear engineer with three decades of experience at a major engineering firm who has worked at all three nuclear power complexes operated by Tokyo Electric [said] “If the fuel is still inside the reactor core, that’s one thing” . But if the fuel has been dispersed more widely, then we are far from any stable shutdown.”

Unless you want your brain to still function well when you're older. Summary of findings: Those with 4-year degrees have brains which, in terms of capability, are 10 years younger by middle age, and beyond. So it's not just about getting a job right out of college. It's about still having a well-functioning mind when you're 50, 60, 70.

What would you pay to be ten years younger, in other words? Makes college education look cheap, at about any price.

Qualifying on the range is one thing, real life situations are something entirely different.

Definitely have to concede the point on that one, but I maintain that 80 ft is still well within the reach of bullets fired from most handguns, accurate user or not.

"New York City police statistics show that simply hitting a target, let alone hitting it in a specific spot, is a difficult challenge. In 2006, in cases where police officers intentionally fired a gun at a person, they discharged 364 bullets and hit their target 103 times, for a hit rate of 28.3 percent ... a 43 percent accuracy rate when the target ranged from zero to six feet away." "In Los Angeles, where there are far fewer shots discharged, the police fired 67 times in 2006 and had 27 hits, a 40 percent hit rate ..." http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/weekinreview/09baker.html?pagewanted=all

Wow, sounds like a good reason we should look into disarming the cops instead of the citizens.

I fare better than 28% accuracy in MW3, and I suck at that game.

Qualifying on the range is one thing, real life situations are something entirely different.

"New York City police statistics show that simply hitting a target, let alone hitting it in a specific spot, is a difficult challenge. In 2006, in cases where police officers intentionally fired a gun at a person, they discharged 364 bullets and hit their target 103 times, for a hit rate of 28.3 percent ... a 43 percent accuracy rate when the target ranged from zero to six feet away."

"In Los Angeles, where there are far fewer shots discharged, the police fired 67 times in 2006 and had 27 hits, a 40 percent hit rate ..."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/weekinreview/09baker.html?pagewanted=all

What he's saying, as a marine salvage expert (the term is "salvor", incidentally) is that there's no way to recover and repair the vessel that he can think of. This job has been given to Smit Salvage, which has a long list of successful salvage jobs. They already have 35 people on site and are getting ready to remove the fuel oil.

It's a tough business. The usual deal is "No cure, no pay", following a long-standing standard contract, the Lloyds Open Form. There are a long list of tricks in marine salvage, developed over the last century. Some require huge equipment, here for the USS Cole.

There are techniques for dealing with big ships. There's underwater patching, giant pontoons, and filling interior spaces with inflatable bladders or even ping-pong balls. Worst case, the ship has to be cut up.

As salvage jobs go, this one is big, but not all that bad. It's in a good climate, near land, in the Mediterranean Sea. (Not the Arctic, not a war zone, not winter North Atlantic.) The ship is unoccupied, not on fire, and mostly above water. It's not blocking an important waterway, so there's no rush. Could be worse.

The first steps are underway - figuring out the buoyancy and stability situation, and preparing to remove the fuel oil. Then there will be a decision - refloat, or cut up in place?

Will Wikipedia, Google and TotalBiscuit black out for us? No? Damn, we're screwed.

In related news, Dodd (MPAA) wants to meet with Silicon Valley behind closed doors, at the White House (the President also needs to be put back in his place?). Yes, it's the New York Times, but you better believe it. Also in the Hollywood Reporter.

The thing is, the Entertainment Industry controls the mainstream media (MSM), or: mass-consumption media, because they are part of the Industry. What the blackout did, was unprecented. Why the Media Moguls were so mad: Silicon Valley (the concerted effort of many independent tech companies) was able to get a news story out to hundreds of millions of people. For one day in history, Silicon Valley was a mainstream medium, and the masses were learning about things that should have been -and successfully had been so far- kept quiet. And millions of people actually did something.

What if Silicon Valley is going to actively promote the creation of a Public Domain by way of a drastic copyright term reduction for sound recordings, movies, software, etc.? It would be their worst nightmare come true. That is why Silicon Valley needs to be silenced. If Dodd (MPAA) is successful, Wikipedia, Google, etc. will no longer black out for anybody. They will meet behind closed doors and the masses can continue to live in blissful ignorance.

What do you mean, "next?" There are already publishers arguing against libraries.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/business/for-libraries-and-publishers-an-e-book-tug-of-war.html

You clearly have never fired a gun or have any idea of what the self-defense laws look like in the U.S. Even with Castle Doctrine laws, you are only authorized to use force if you are in imminent target of lethal or non-lethal force. Shooting people in the back as they take off with someone else's property is completely unjustified, as you not in danger. Before you continue dramatically dreaming up events to justify your philosophy, think about the hard working, law abiding citizen, who is just about to lose everything he ever will be (his life) from not complying with the muggers demands vs bankrupting his future defending his life in court.

http://itemlive.com/articles/2012/01/12/news/news01.txt

Stuff like this should never happen, had that lawyer not stepped in to defend this man for free he would be bankrupt, and perhaps worse, plead out to a lesser crime. All because he refused to turn his back on a man with a knife.

You don't appear to be aware that the SCOTUS ruling where the police are in fact not responsible for your
personal safety.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/28scotus.html

In the end, who was really responsible for the lives of those 3 children? Now dead. The mother who wasn't keeping an eye
on them, or the police who failed to enforce the restraining order on the estranged husband in a timely matter?

Once George Eastman died Kodak began its death knell...

Kodak for many years was not profitable the big trend in the 1990's was to Layoff and fire a bunch of fulltime workers in the 3rd and 4th quaters right around July & August (just in time to save on paying out vacation pay) and then again around November to December up to 1 week before Christmas. I know this because I watched peoples parents who worked 15, 20, 25, and 30 years at the company get pink slips for no reason. Then right after the new year 1st quater they would bring in thousands of temp workers to backfill those jobs. Meanwhile this made their stock float and made them look profitable since a company profits are determined by sales - costs . So by lessing the payroll they more or less fudged their profitability for years. Look back at all the layoff annoucements they always happened in the 3rd and 4th quaters of the year just in time to give the stock a bounce in the new year.

Additionally Kodak workers in the Rochester are were very loyal they bought only Kodak Cameras and anything else that was Kodak. Years ago they had employee suggestion boxes where if employees made a suggestion that benefitted the company, a refinement to an assembly line, a better way to product something, a new product an employee could write in the suggestions and in turn if it helped make the company more money by cutting costs or creating new streams of revenue the employee would see a percentage bonus in their pay based on the amount of money that idea generated. I know many people whos parents and grandparents got monetary awards from this program. However by the 1990's Kodak managers would just take your ideas as theirs and the monetary award system was ended. They became greedy

Also over the years within a few square miles of Kodak Park was a cluster of kids coming down with rare cancers, http://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/02/nyregion/rochester-parents-fret-and-sue-over-cancer.html This is also a MUST READ http://www.coldtype.net/Assets/pdfs/17.Nim.May27.pdf

in this same area people were reporting strange odors, animals becoming sick and dying, weird residue on their cars and homes, and odd fluids seeping up in their basements. One of the famous areas was Rand Street. Kodak was sued and they ended up paying out an undisclosed amount to owners of some of the Rand Street Homes. Kodak was sued multiple times for illegal dumping, fined multiple times by the EPA for being out of compliance with their factory exaust stacks. However the EPA was up and down with them while they went against them on some things they backed them on others. It wasnt until the 1990's the EPA started cracking down on them. Prior to that they turned a blind eye to what they were doing.

However they still continued to pollute the rochester region. Eastman Chemical which was part of Kodak until spun off had experimental chemicals inside of it that no one even know what they would do if they ever escaped the drums they were being stored in and because they were deemed "experimental" they did not have the same precautions and established handling procedures as known chemicals which carry MSDS sheets etc. Toulene, Benze, TCE you name it they had it.

The management became a complete joke you had managers managing managers, managing managers they made the same mistake that Xerox did. Too many inexperienced or burned out chiefs and not enough Indians. The 1990s caused part of this issue with the EOE b.s. many times fully qualified caucasian workers were passed up for job promotions, management positions and so forth especially males. If you were Latino, African American, or Asian or had a certain sexual preference you would get promoted to the top in no time even if you didn't knw how to do the job or have a college background or experience in it. Xerox did the same thing. They were both paranoid of dis

Actually Kodak's destruction was helped not in a small way by government's actions preventing Kodak from diversifying their business the way they wanted to (we already had a discussion on this very topic only a few days ago here).

The big mistake that Kodak made was staying in US and not outsourcing immediately from US and running the business the way they saw fit and moving out of the way of IRS and US regulators. Big mistake, that was not repeated by many other companies since the nineties.

I was heartened to read that some prominent congressmen have withdrawn their support for PIPA/SOPA: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/technology/web-protests-piracy-bill-and-2-key-senators-change-course.html

What about the 30 years of science that has been conducted in peer reviewed literature. This is not just that debate? Please explain.

I got'cha beat. There was over 50 years of peer-reviewed, scientific debate and research regarding the validity of the theory of eugenics. Despite that, the Cold Springs Harbour laboratory continued to try to prop up the theory right up until the 60's, when it was no longer deemed 'popular' enough to merit support.

Why are scientists not capable of determining what constitutes a scientific debate? According to them, this is what they've been doing, You disagree. So please explain to me and them why they are wrong and you are right. Why we should listen to you and not to the established process of science.

The current round of screaming and name-calling is considered debate? I'm sorry, emotions generally do not belong in scientific discussions, only religious ones.

The 'established process of science' is as subject to political and social pressures as is any area of life, no matter how much we would like to think otherwise. It can be a tool for discovering objective truths about the universe, but only if the tools used (i.e., the scientists) are able to be objective, or lacking that, have clear, repeatable and unassailable data to work with. Too many temperature datasets are generated by inferred parameters for me to be comfortable asserting the latter, and there is too much funding to be had by researchers who toe the AGW line to be sure of the former.

I know, there aren't any pure long-term datasets to work from (with temperature alone, it is quite difficult to find any 'pure' datasets at all, since most if not all long term datasets have been subject to calibration corrections, adjustments for location changes, environmental adjustments, instrument malfunction adjustments or data loss, etc.), but an awful lot of speculation is riding on the correct interpretation of those secondary and tertiary measurements.

Because the non-scientists demands that science conform to THEIR strictures and not those that make sense to scientists smacks of exactly Hitler's assault on his own scientists.

Actually, there's surprisingly little proof that Hitler pressured his own scientists. Eugenics was an established theory, with decades of research supporting it. Plus they knew where their funding was coming from.

Consider this: which proposal would be more likely to receive funding today?
"An examination of the mating habits and migratory patterns of Clangula hyemalis"
"An examination of the impact of global warming on the mating habits and migratory patterns of Clangula hyemalis"

After all, who cares when a duck fucks, except a duck? Ahhh, but if humans are negatively impacting the long-tailed duck's love live by warming up the planet, then that's something that should be investigated with all possible speed!

In fact, the AG of Virginia, Ken Cucinelli, is right now using the power of the state to harass and pursue Michael Mann:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/science/earth/23virginia.html?pagewanted=all

Good. I'm sorry, but if you do research on the public dollar, you should be prepared to turn over all of your research for review by the public. Especially if your conclusions promote a political and/or socio-economic agenda. What's wrong with that? Why is it 'persecution' to want to be able to see the data and reasoning used to draw the conclusions that Mann has drawn? Isn't that, in fact, a key step in the scientific method, proving that your conclusions are repeatable by anyone else using the same process and inputs?

As to Eugenics its a red herring argument. The fact

Smirk. I love it when deniers step up to defined science against the politicization of science! So principled! Such reasonable people!

Smirk.

OK point by point ... your assertion- that there has to be zealot free debate on this topic. What about the 30 years of science that has been conducted in peer reviewed literature. This is not just that debate? Please explain.

Why are scientists not capable of determining what constitutes a scientific debate? According to them, this is what they've been doing, You disagree. So please explain to me and them why they are wrong and you are right. Why we should listen to you and not to the established process of science.

Because the non-scientists demands that science conform to THEIR strictures and not those that make sense to scientists smacks of exactly Hitler's assault on his own scientists.

In fact, the AG of Virginia, Ken Cucinelli, is right now using the power of the state to harass and pursue Michael Mann:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/science/earth/23virginia.html?pagewanted=all

As to Eugenics its a red herring argument. The fact that some dead people in another time believed some false theory is totally irrelevant to the material truth of falsehood of the data and models which are AGW.

You attempt to inject that into the discussion is a perfect example of a known logical fallacy in thinking.

It is TOTALLY irrelevant because there is not some enduring set of people who exist over generations "the scientists" who "cannot be trusted" just as the people who are alive today who in no way bear any responsibility for what the Germans did in 1932 despite their being German.

If that's the criteria- and it can't be if we're to live rationally at all- then we have to be suspicious of literally everyone and all institutions for all time.

At Nuremberg, the Nazi defense team , in an attempt to legitimize their mass murder, quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes from the infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell trial. where he wrote: , âoeIt is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.â

It didn't work then and it's not going to work now.

Links, please, to back up where you believe the science is faulty, and to back up your premise that if you disagree with the general consensus of climatologists that it's hard to get funding. I just don't buy that; especially not with the general Republican stance. They love their climate denial scientists lots. Though, they seem to have a lot of trouble finding any to fund. And thus, they try to cut funding for ALL climate change research.

I do know, however, that GWBush tried to silence NASA scientists from talking about Global Warming, and that House Republicans are still at it (we all know how biased NASA is, right? /snark)

So, please. If you're going to make assertions, back them up. Otherwise, it's just faith based denial.

Really?

There really is a lot of corporate based funding for anti-climate change "science". (Though, right there, it's not really science, as it starts with bias. But the funding is there.)

And even when they manage to get scientists to go along with the whole denial thing, it has been known to backfire. Rather spectacularly.

lol

Maybe not.

But consider this: the folks whose job it is to make predictions tend to think that the impact will be felt sooner, rather than later. Folks like those who work in the Pentagon and the CDC, not to mention an overwhelming majority of the world's scientists.

Yeah, don't bother looking up the statistics or anything. Just make a sarcastic comment to insinuate you know what you're talking about.

In 2005, California paid $290 billion in taxes and received $240 billion in federal spending. California's deficit currently stands at $11 billion. Now, I'm no mathematician, but I'm pretty sure 290 - 240 > 11.

His point is that unless Honda and Toyota started making cars out of concrete, thinking they are radioactive is fear-mongering until there is actually evidence of that. I would eat their food, as it most definitely will have passed through a port with radiation monitors to get to me and be seen as safe to eat or be destroyed (see here). I also smoked for many years and drink a decent bit, so I don't exactly do everything I can to live a pristine and safe life.

Does Carfax report if a used car has been known to be in radioactive hot spots?

That post was a response to GP's assertion that "The United States is the global leader in tyranny, bloodshed, and misery. More tyranny, bloodshed, and misery has been propagated by our leaders over the past 100 years than anyone else in the world...

Nobody asserted that this was a list of genocides, though without a doubt much of it is; to be eminently clear (because apparently it needs to be made so) everything on the list is boils down to this: people doing what they're best at--fucking up other people.

Anyway, the singular point your ill-thought diatribe revolves around is shit, for this reason: the rather conservative 1.2 million number includes the ~0.75M military men who died in action in the Ottoman Empire or on its borders, plus the Armenian genocide, which was indeed ongoing through 1915 - 1923. What it does not include are the civilian deaths due to famine and disease, which wound in fact bring the total up to around 2.8-3 million, as if such accuracy were possible.

Coming full circle: when Americans roll their army down the road, regardless of the reason, the difference between the U.S. and everyone on that list comes down to this: while civilians are bound to die in a war zone, due to military action and especially famine, disease, etc., *we don't actually try to kill civilians*, and in fact we usually exert a great effort to avoid killing civilians, and repair and pay for the infrastructure and private property we destroy along the way.

Care to argue that point?

all these ignoring the fact that no armenian anywhere else in the empire was harmed in 1915, and the armenian artisans, bureaucrats, shopkeepers and business owners in istanbul or elsewhere kept about their business as always.

*Cough*...BULLSHIT!....*Cough* Have fun with a Times article... Hundreds of Armenians were rounded up and executed in April, 1915. Documented.

So, with the level of intellectual dishonesty (or willful ignorance) exhibited here and apparent sensitivity to the Armenian genocide, the question arises: Are you a Turk? Guilty conscious much?

We will disclose your Personally-Identifiable Data if we reasonably believe we are required to do so by law, regulation or other government authority [...]

From SpiderOak Service Agreement:

You may use the Services only for lawful purposes and solely in accordance with this Agreement and any other specific terms of use, rules or policies, as may be provided by SpiderOak from time to time, that may be applicable to any particular portion of the Services. You may not store, transmit or share through the Services any material, or otherwise engage in any conduct that: violates or infringes the rights of others, including without limitation patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright, publicity or other proprietary rights; involves uploading, posting, emailing, transmitting or otherwise making available Selected Data that you do not have the right to make available under any law or under contractual or fiduciary relationships (such as insider information, proprietary and confidential information learned or disclosed as part of employment relationships or under non-disclosure agreements, etc.); [... and a lot more stuff ... ]

Question: if they are truly "zero knowledge", why would they care? They cannot identify infringing data anyway, if it's true. Furthermore, we know that being in the US, they will have to comply with government requests to access your data and they are not allowed to tell you. Also, while IANAL, their terms offer many loopholes, such as the possibility to employ (very) weak encryption in cases where some 3rd party desires access to your data. Therefore I'd trust Wuala more, it's based in Europe, where such secret subpoenas are (AFAIK) not possible. For people who have an absolute need for "privacy" (or for breaking the law, which in some free speech-impaired countries is very dangerous), there's still Freenet, which can be used as a (cumbersome) file storage...

The Colorado river, which supplies most of the water for southwestern cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas, no longer reaches the ocean. All of the water is diverted and used up along the way, mostly for agriculture.

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2010/07/29/colorado_river_aspen_environment_forum/
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/all-rivers-do-not-run-to-the-sea/

The results of that review have not yet been announced, but the type of geothermal energy explored in Basel and at the Geysers requires fracturing the bedrock then circulating water through the cracks to produce steam. By its nature, fracturing creates earthquakes, though most of them are small.

I live near The Geysers, where "treated" sewage water is pumped into the ground in order to keep geothermal production up at the powerplant, which is perpetually over budget and under production, and which has produced a superfund site where they formerly buried the spray-off from the turbine wheels in drums. The turbines are produced by Halliburton — I've seen the red Halliburton truck dragging one up Bottle Rock Rd. on a massive flatbed. Failure all around... the one bright spot is that there is a process for making claims for damage due to the euphemistically-named "microseismicity" as it is generally accepted that the pumping causes quakes.

"Big spender", huh? You teabagger retards are such idiots you can't even lie convincingly. Your village idiot outspent President Obama by far and ruined the U.S. economy. It's a historic fact. References: Nytimes.com (not for braindead): http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24sun4.html

Are you talking about India or the United States?

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/01/28/business/economy/economix-28milanovic/economix-28milanovic-custom1.jpg

It's also worth mentioning that the Gini coefficient used to dismiss the US as a hellhole of inequality is the one that disregards transfer payments: Once those have been taken into account, the number is within 5 points of such anarcho-capitalist, dog-eat-dog countries as Canada and Australia.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/absolute-poverty/

In terms of absolute poverty, we're one of the highest in the West, and all of the other nations on the list provide universal health care.

In either case, it's safe to stay that Americans have some of the worst income inequality out of any country, and among similar Western nations, are in the bottom 10% when it comes to relative poverty rates, absolute poverty rates, child poverty rates, health care, and education. If you'd like to be proud of that, you're welcome to, but I'm certainly not.

Patriotism is doing meaningful things to improve the lives of your fellow citizens, not pretending a problem doesn't exist to make yourself feel better about your country.

Cheap remote-sensing bots have already been used in the Arab spring, as told here.