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Able to lead a productive life if we just shield him a little

There's enough wiggle room in that statement to make the actual policy anything from soup kitchens to mass institutionalization. So yeah, he needs help, but the devil's in the details.

I work part time at my state's main mental hospital.The campus is lovely in design, but maintenance often leaves something to desire. In the era of mass institutionalization, the campus was self-supporting for food, and patients served as groundskeepers and light maintenance personnel. That's a big part of how they were able to do it at all - effectively slave labor. Although the other extreme, where we are now, prevents them from taking such jobs even if they want to. A room full of schizophrenics, nothing to do all day but watch TV... no way that could go wrong, eh?

BTW, what do you mean about Reagan? Deinstitutionalization was almost complete by 1980. Look here at the first graph.

For example, why have the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? One doesn't need an an organization with that structure to protect the rights of the customer.

Seriously? Before the credit card reform law of 2009, credit card companies could arbitrarily change the interest rate (sometimes retroactively), the billing cycle, and any and all terms of the agreement without little notice to the consumer. The law also created the bureau to ensure that the credit card companies followed the rules. The bureau's aim is also to ensure that consumers know exactly what they owed and how long to they have to pay off any debts. Credit card companies have long gotten away with shady practices. It's the same reason why a SEC exists. In light of the financial shenanigans, some would argue for more oversight, not less.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/real-csi/ The episode call "The Real CSI", wanted to post it among the top rated comments hopefully people will pass it around, and get a look at how a set of new standards that SHOULD be in place for all DNA/physical evidence. I also view these episodes with an open mind realizing that some of the statements and or reporting is a little over zealous.

...Innovators and inventors...

I like the distinction Cringely made a decade ago between "invention" and "innovation": http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2003/pulpit_20030904_000784.html

But there is another issue here, one that is hardly ever mentioned and that's the coining of the term "innovation." This word, which was hardly used at all until two or three years ago, feels to me like a propaganda campaign and a successful one at that, dominating discussion in the computer industry. I think Microsoft did this intentionally, for they are the ones who seem to continually use the word. But what does it mean? And how is it different from what we might have said before? I think the word they are replacing is "invention." Bill Shockley invented the transistor, Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce invented the integrated circuit, Ted Hof invented the microprocessor. Of course others claimed to have done those same three things, but the goal was always invention. Only now we innovate, which is deliberately vague but seems to stop somewhere short of invention. Innovators have wiggle room. They can steal ideas, for example, and pawn them off as their own. That's the intersection of innovation and sharp business.

I forgot to add that while male genital mutilation is currently irrevocable there is some hope for men who are not happy with what was done to them. The field of regenerative medicine is rapidly advancing and holds the key to regenerating a natural foreskin.

The video on this page isn't about foreskins but it gives a good idea of where this is going and how quickly. (requires flash)

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/july-dec11/tissuescience_12-15.html

There is a non profit organisation raising money for research of foreskin regeneration.

http://www.foregen.org/

It has non profit status in the USA and donations are tax deductible.

Are you exaggerating when you say "massive handouts"? My understanding is that the oil industry is allowed tax breaks that are equivalent to what other industries get, and they do not get the direct subsidies that say wind and solar get. Depending on what tax break that is being considered this is 2-4 billion a year, maybe 2% of their profit.

http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/rick-newman/2012/03/29/why-big-oil-should-give-up-its-tax-breaks
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/29/us-obama-energy-idUSBRE82S11P20120329
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_prez_oil_tax_break_lies_Y2Yj6KCU9QIO0BKHs1Be7M
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/jan-june11/oiltax_05-12.html

Perhaps with women... Then again...

You'll be hard pressed to find a single peer reviewed study that shows finger prints to be a valid means of identification

challenge accepted

http://lpr.oxfordjournals.org/content/7/2/87.short

Counter example:

In 2004, cognitive neoroscientist Itiel Dror set out to examine whether the process of fingerprint analysis, long considered one of the most reliable forms of forensic science, can be biased by the knowledge examiners have when they attempt to find a match for prints from a crime scene... Dror constructed an experiment using the case of Brandon Mayfield. Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer, was at the center of international controversy in 2004 after the FBI and an independent analyst incorrectly matched his prints to a partial print found on a bag of detonators from the Madrid terrorist bombings.

Dror asked five fingerprint experts to examine what they were told were the erroneously matched prints of Mayfield. In fact, they were re-examining prints from their own past cases. Only one of the experts stuck by their previous judgments. Three reversed their previous decisions and one deemed them “inconclusive.”

You can have your cake and eat it, too. But I'm not responsible for buying it for you.

Except it's more like you having and eating your cake, and you are responsible. Where does your food come from? Farms in rural settings? If they have to pay a lot for broadband then they will raise their prices for your food. Unless you can do or make for yourself everything you want you have to pay for others to receive services and goods you get too. Personally I'd rather pay more or donate to those I choose to than have government forcibly take money from me to give to others. At the same tyme I believe in getting what I pay for as well as having a choice as to who will provide what I want to buy. However we, US taxpayers, don't have either. The federal government gave the cable and phone broadband providers $200 Billion, oops >$300 Billion to build out broadband access. We did not get it. Governments also gave these large corporations monopolies, get rid of the monopolies and let there be competition. That includes airwave monopolies.

I'm tired of being embarrassed by my government.

Anyone remember the Pentagon Papers ... which lead to Nixon's fall? The sad thing is all of that lying started before Kennedy and is still happening today.

BTW, there's a PBS program about the Pentagon Papers on-air now. I think everyone in the world can watch it here: http://video.pbs.org/video/1602912290/

I'm tired of being embarrassed by my government. If the people in the government think something should be a secret, then perhaps THE GOVERNMENT SHOULDN'T BE DOING IT!

I'm not stating evolution of species is not possible mind you, but that we have no proof so need treat the theories for what they are.

Here you go.

Youtube has this program about the life of Nikola Tesla http://www.youtube.com/watch?nomobile=1&v=eoY_7mbm5ng PBS has this interactive page on the man... http://www.pbs.org/tesla/

• Sneak and Peek: https://ssd.eff.org/your-computer/govt/sneak-and-peek
• Stop and Frisk http://www.nyclu.org/stopandfrisk
• Warrantless Wiretapping http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/07/federal-appeals-court-says-warrantless-wiretapping-is-legal/
• License Plate Readers http://www.policeone.com/police-products/traffic-enforcement/license-plate-readers/
• Civil Seizure http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20091112/METRO/911120388
• Forfeit without Trial http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/07/megaupload-judge-recusal/
• Extraordinary Rendition http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/rendition701/
• Assassination without trial http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/world/middleeast/secret-us-memo-made-legal-case-to-kill-a-citizen.html?pagewanted=all

Many people are laughing all the way to the morgue.

In many cases, electronics that are supposed to be recycled really aren't. Instead, they are dumped in the Third World where they cause all kinds of environmental problems.

Even when some actual recycling is done, it is likely to make the impact on the environment worse, not better, than if it was just dumped in a landfill. See this article for some details (with photos) of how an electronics "recycling" operation in China threatens both the environment and worker safety. Of course, it's all about the Benjamins: "Sending a monitor to China costs about ten cents. Actually recycling it costs several dollars."

If the European Union wants this regulation to have a positive impact, they need to stipulate that the equipment be recycled locally under EU safety and environmental standards – not just exported to Ghana or China and down the memory hole.

We stayed up and watched this, initially to see Benedict Cumberbatch: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/lastenemy/synopsis.html

All we need now is an unexplained outbreak of an unknown disease in some conflict-ridden part of the world. (Maybe the recent Ebola outbreak in Uganda? http://allafrica.com/stories/201208120306.html )

Oh, I duhno.

posting anon because I may or may not be a Founding Father

Not to mention that in the places they aren't regulated they just get together and have nice little deals, see cherry picking for an example. in my town there are plenty of places where if you live on the LEFT side you can get cable and/or DSL, but not the right....WTF? Its a street, not a fucking canyon! I've been having to deal with this kind of bullshit for years myself, my mother lives barely a block from the cable and DSL junction boxes, you can literally see both from her front door...neither will run it a single block and now that the local WISP is going OOB (thank's to them being gouged on backbone access from what i heard) if I can't bug the living shit out of them until they'll run it the boys are gonna have to move and leave my elderly mother alone because they can't go to college without broadband.

Frankly the whole situation in the USA is like a bad joke, the prices are crazy, service in most places lousy, if you can even GET service, and things certainly aren't getting any better. We need to just take the last mile and open it up to competition and then if the ISPs want a monopoly they'll have to run decent lines out to all those people they've been ignoring for years. Our broadband isn't low because people don't want it, its low because they either can't get it or the only option in their area charges ass raping prices!

Hell we already paid them 200 billion for nationwide broadband and all we got in return was a low rez Goatse while they stuffed the money into their pockets. Of course this country has become so damned corrupt and "all hail the corporate masters!" that good fucking luck getting anything done about it.

You would do well to research the 'Fast and Furious' background more before you peddle your ideological tripe. The fact is that gun shop owners are not the unscrupulous enablers or pathetic imbeciles you make them out to be. They were actually reporting this suspicious activity to the BATFE, and they wanted to stop selling guns to certain people, but as part of the 'Fast and Furious' operation, the BATFE instructed them to continue the sales. Several gun sellers were deliberately acting irresponsibly under the advisement of BATFE agents! Some sources.

You need to use a dictionary more often. Just because you don't like what someone else is posting doesn't make it incorrect. Apple is censoring content.

Your assertion is not the same thing as a dictionary. You are just as mistaken as the other poster if you think that a store choosing not to stock a product is censorship. You don't understand the word.

How about backing that up with some actual dictionary references instead of asserting your opinion as a definition?
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censorship
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/censorship
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/censor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/whodecides/definitions.html

Some definitions mention "official", but not all mention government as a necessary component.

Censorship is a word of many meanings. In its broadest sense it refers to suppression of information, ideas, or artistic expression by anyone, whether government officials, church authorities, private pressure groups, or speakers, writers, and artists themselves. It may take place at any point in time, whether before an utterance occurs, prior to its widespread circulation, or by punishment of communicators after dissemination of their messages, so as to deter others from like expression. In its narrower, more legalistic sense, censorship means only the prevention by official government action of the circulation of messages already produced. Thus writers who "censor" themselves before putting words on paper, for fear of failing to sell their work, are not engaging in censorship in this narrower sense, nor are those who boycott sponsors of disliked television shows.
--Academic American Encyclopedia

Reading. It's not just for the landed gentry any more.

Nova and other PBS programs are available on their website: http://video.pbs.org/

105 full episodes of Nova are currently watchable there. I recommend re-cancelling your cable.

Maybe it will start playing white wedding then?

Could a wedding help? Whatever happened to the ancient idea of a princess from one country marrying a price from another and then all the conflicts or religious differences being set aside?
(the modern movie version might have two princes, but whatever works?)

Best to stay away from those sections of religious texts where people do bad things to non-believers, and even their animals. Someone wrote about the section of the bible the other day, but got the spelling wrong "Dude Iran N' Me"

A while back Bill Moyers had a guest on with a different insightful perspective on evolution of religious beliefs and some things done bridging differing cultures. He has a book. He compares some behavior using gaming theory (zero sum acts versus not)

The Evolution of God by Robert Wright
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07172009/profile.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JisN9t504IU

something different than a hit tune, musically political
Gil-Scott Heron (passed away May 2011)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcHOq8i5Pyk

It's too bad fish can't talk

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/climate-change/july-dec12/swinomish_07-18.html

it's biased towards "highbrow" which is to appeal to left leaning upper middle class people.

right, because PBS and NPR are trying to promote enriching and beneficial news and entertainment in separate realms. as for the left leaning upper middle class people, i guess they just havent succumbed to the sophistication of nascar and larry the cable guy.

It focuses much more on culture that the masses don't care about (such as opera).

So the acclaimed science program Nova, Inspector Lewis, Downtown Abbey, and Childrens programming like Barney? im sure there are others

Oddly, it's pro investing but mildly anti-business

so a television station that isnt willing to just carte blanche pander for advertising cash and instead gets a chance to truly criticize things like hydraulic fracturing and the pharmaceutical industry has somehow become a bad thing.

I doubt your brother has ever watched PBS (the "listeny" one is called NPR, both under the CPB but separate entities.) flamebait bullshit like "theres a small bit of truth" is the same crap FOX does in order to gin up dissent against anything that goes against the GOP or its inherent interests. it would be better to say "my brother once watched Tavis Smiley form a coherent and well structured argument against the established patterns and processes of social inequality as it applies to race, and that didnt fit with my american dream narrative so now the entire station is some sort of marxist cabal."

This Frontline was a real eye-opener. The real issue is that, aside from DNA testing most all of the techniques used were developed by law enforcement and not the scientific community. Among other things they discuss the case of Brandon Mayfield, wrongly accused of the Madrid train bombings by "100%" verified fingerprint analysis...scary stuff.

You are probably making a mistake somewhere, but since there are no sources for your numbers, the Carbon Dioxide Information Analsysis Center (CDIAC) says that the world's fuel burning and cement use emitted 9,139 Tg of Carbon into the atmosphere in 2010, that's a little over 33.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide.

According to PBS, world carbon dioxide sources break down this way (The EPA has similar numbers):

1. 25.9% - energy supply
2. 19.4% - industry
3. 17.4% - forestry
4. 13.5% - agriculture
5. 13.1% - transportation
6. 7.9% - residential and commerical buildings
7. 2.8% - waste and waste water

So your back of the envelope calculation for human emissions looks like it's based on incorrect assumptions (under estimating because you only considered transportation and only in 2 countries).

If we try to fix the obvious errors and multiply your estimate by 7.7, to get from 13% to 100, that puts us at around 22 billion tons of CO2, which is still lower than the actual measured number. If we also account for only considering two countries (Wikipedia puts the combined emissions of China and the United States at around 41% of world emissions) by multiplying by 2.5, that gives us 55 billion tons of carbon dioxide from your estimate, which is almost double the measured amount. I'm guessing that your estimate of gas used for transportation is actually a little on the high side.

As for the amount of CO2 released by Mt. St. Helens, here's an article about the Eyjafjoell eruption. The estimate places it's emissions at around 150,000 tonnes of CO2 per day. Your calculation would mean the St. Helens eruption produced about 681,818 times the daily emissions of Eyjafjoell. According to wikipedia article on the Mt. St. Helens eruption only about 0.045 cubic miles of new lava was released, which means about the upper limit of CO2 emissions from lava would be about 153 million tonnes, that's for the initial eruption, the subsequent flows produced about an additional 0.05 cubic miles of new lava. That puts the estimate at a little over 300 million tonnes for the upper limit of the emissions using your conversion rates.

You have your facts wrong, but in an interesting way. We never decided that we couldn't force people into quarantine. One of the first pieces I ever read on drug resistant tuberculosis included an interview with a guy shackled to a bed in a New York hospital because he repeatedly skipped his meds. I didn't dig up that story which my quick search, but I did find this NOVA timeline. Check it out:

• New York City detained more than 200 people who refused TB treatment in the 1990s.
• The powers to involuntarily quarantine people were expanded after 9/11.

And a direct quote (from the as of 2004 part):

• The Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, part of the CDC's National Center for Infectious Diseases, controls quarantine issues in the United States today. The Division oversees eight national quarantine stationsâ"in New York, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Honolulu. At present, federal, state, and some city health officials have the right to isolate or quarantine individuals who are ill or may become ill with a potentially lethal infectious disease.

So we never stopped quarantining people. Anyway, political correctness has nothing to do with TB treatment, or with drug resistant strains of TB. From my readings, drug resistant TB incubates in Russian Prisons and Mexican day laborers, and in India. Given your self professed aversion to political correctness, I'm surprised you skipped over those populations and leapt to "immune compromised patients with no self control." You may have meant inmates in the aforementioned Russian prisoners, who literally have no control over their surroundings or their treatments, but it sounded like an unsubtle swipe at gay people. That part of your comment sounded an awful lot like 90s-era hate speech, which had moved from "AIDS is God actively killing homosexuals to", "HIV isn't a problem because it only kills people who lack self-control [and have un-Christian sex before marriage]". I have never heard, anywhere, that people with AIDS are contributing to drug resistant TB. If they stop taking their meds, they die.

Lastly, you seem to be upset about "ObamaTax". That's okay. But to clarify, did you really think a government that can force people people to buy insurance couldn't already force them into quarantine? Or is the costs aspect that upsets you? Maybe you have some nuanced views, but you sure seem like a troll, so I don't mind feeding you LMGTFY links. But even if you are, I didn't want you worrying about our government not being able to quarantine people ;-)

The full quote is much better, but SlashDot's ridiculously limiting signature length forced me to truncate it: "The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity made by those responsible for the security of a nation." -- Alan Dershowitz in Tortured Reasoning.

I do not think Windows is better for science. I wouldn't try to tell someone their choice in computing was wrong. That would make me no better than an actual Linux zealot, Mac fanboy, or Microsoft snob. I know Linux works extremely well for scientific endeavors because it still provides easy access to the basic Turing machine. Just as Windows and Java are favored in business because they offer layers of abstractions that make it easier to distance yourself from the Turing machine to represent the types of models the business world requires. It's similar to the reason Physics favors calculus (where numbers only exist to show their relationship to other numbers or are objective measurements) and Psychology favors statistics (where numbers tend to represent natural objects or are subjective measurements) yet both sciences use the scientific method (hypothesize, observe, evaluate, predict).

My point was that your post was perfectly fine until the last three sentences. They serve no purpose but to discredit the reader's own experiences as irrelevant. I understand you're trying to force the reader to examine where you're coming from (scientific programming) . The problem is that it comes across merely as an appeal to authority, and those don't work very well on an anonymous Internet. You literally say "best to keep quiet about stuff you know nothing about," which says "you clearly know nothing, don't bother talking." To me, that's one of the most offensive things to say I can think of in the context of a discussion. Is what you said so far removed from "STFU & GTFO"?

In your response to my post, you also say " However, it was you who chose to interpret this defensively and in a particular way. I cannot help you with that I'm afraid." I would caution you against this type of phrasing as well. It also comes across as condescending. Communication requires effort of two parties. You are the one trying to communicate a message. Your job is to make the words you use as clear and concise as possible, because human language is inherently fuzzy and prone to confusion. Many words have multiple definitions as well as cultural connotative and denotative meanings, and all of these meanings are valid as they serve to communicate a message. You do not have the luxury of domain-specific jargon in general language, so you must be very clear with your wording. Even then, you must expect people to misinterpret or ask for clarification. It's safe to assume you would not have tried to communicate if you did not wish to be understood, yes? The alternative is a rather deep rabbit hole. It is then very insulting to be told first I don't know anything and should not respond, and then told it's my fault for failing to understand your message. This will just make me as a listener give up and dismiss your message outright.

Now yes, you'll note I said that communication is a two way street. As a listener it is my responsibility to attempt to interpret your message as openly as possible. That is, to look for as many interpretations of your message as I can, and then, using context, try to decide on the correct one. Additionally, it is the listener's responsibility to ask for clarification when they do not understand the message. Intentionally choosing to interpret things in the most offensive way possible will simply make the speaker give up, I agree. The talking heads on what passes for television news today are far more guilty of this than most lawyers, to the detriment of understanding everywhere. My response to your post was my way -- agreeably unfair and

Sorry friend but you haven't read Wickard v. Filburn which was a man growing his OWN feed for his OWN chickens on his OWN land, can't get less interstate than that and thanks to SCOTUS having a gun held to its head by FDR (which i thought should have been impeached and should have went down as being just as bad as Nixon for his threats against the SCOTUS) it made the commerce clause into "anything the POTUS wants it to be" and is only now having a teeny tiny bit of its massive power reined in.

As for TFA it is THIS, this right here, why we need to have a WPA style system to build a national broadband infrastructure and to force open the last mile to competition. We have already paid 200 billion for a national broadband infrastructure and all we got from the telecos and cablecos was a low res picture of goatse while their CEOs pocketed the cash, and in many areas your "choice" is being fucked by one company or having nothing at all. By having REAL competition like we had during the days of dialup we could have lower prices and increased competition instead of being one of the worst companies in the west for broadband speeds. i mean fricking Romania kicks our ass now!

Without competition we are doomed to be stuck on the short bus to the info superhighway while the duopoly simply adds caps and blocks and other draconian measures to insure that they don't have to spend a dime on upgrades and can continue to oversell the living hell out of the lines they do have. like the rest of our infrastructure the backbone is falling down around our ears but rather than give up a cent of profit they'll just throttle the living hell out of everyone, thus killing any innovation in media, electronic education, or entertainment. if they had their way you'd be using the same bandwidth the average granny did in 2004 and if you didn't they'd empty your wallet or just kick you off completely. With more and more private and government services increasingly becoming broadband only this shit needs to be brought to a screeching halt. sadly our congress critters are so damned bribed they might as well wear "sponsored by" shirts, good luck on anything getting better.

It usually means they placed a value of $XXX on an asset (perhaps by purchasing it, sometimes by just making it up), and are now admitting that the asset isn't worth that much. During the dot com boom a lot of companies claimed an asset called "good will", which meant they thought the company's brand/reputation/customer base/whatever was worth something. After a while they quit kidding themselves (if no fool like Ballmer has purchased them) and write it off. My favorite was when AOL "lost" $99 Billion by writing it off. Even though they never made that much and were never worth that much. But it looked cool on their balance sheet for a while.

If you haven't seen it, go watch The Persuaders and see how advertisers focus more on emotional connections rather than the product they are selling. The very same emotional connections cults use.
After watching this it is much easier to see why these flame wars exist and that participating in them is much like participating in a Christians vs atheists thread.

"(both parties are to blame for this)"
no.

Watch Frontline's The Warning sometime. The Democrats and Clinton, along with the Republicans, believed Greenspan and his buddies that regulating the derivatives market wasn't required and would harm business.

Stimulus is about de-leveraging debt through works.

It's about creating more debt in the hopes that it will jumpstart a stalled economy.

Here's some actual comparison. First, PBS Newshour reporting on the Arizona immigration law ruling:

The U.S. Supreme Court delivered its judgment today on the 2010 Arizona immigration law that sparked a national debate. The outcome left both sides claiming at least partial victories. The decision came after two years of protests and legal challenges to the Arizona law, then the April arguments before the Supreme Court, today, the decision,5-3, with Justice Elena Kagan recusing herself because she worked on the issue in the Obama administration. The court ruled Arizona may not force immigrants to carry immigration papers or make it a crime for an illegal immigrant to hold a job or let police arrest suspected illegals without warrant.

This was followed by reactions from Arizona governor Jan Brewer, President Obama's statement, and analysis by someone from The National Law Journal.

Now Fox News reporting the same thing:

Tonight, both sides of the aisle are claiming victory after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a split decision on the Arizona immigration law. Now, three aspects of SB-1070 was struck down by the high court in the five to three ruling. However, the cornerstone of that law was upheld. Now, that critical provision is the one that requires police officers to verify the legal status of anybody that they suspect to be in the country illegally. And liberals from President Obama to the Attorney General Eric Holder have long claimed that this measure would somehow lead to widespread racial profiling. And that line of attack was revisited today on the Senate floor by Harry Reid just moments after the ruling was in fact handed down.

After the clip of Harry Reid, Hannity states "Now, it's unfortunate that Harry Reid would rather play politics than protect the border." and follows up with

Please explain to me exactly what bias PBS demonstrated in this report, and explain why the last comment by Hannity isn't an example of a very clear political slant.

Yes, the public has been ignored, research even ordered destroyed when it didn't support the pre-determined outcome.

The story
http://web.archive.org/web/20090123153744/http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/09/18/senator_says_media_study_suppressed/

The suppressed report
http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-267448A1.pdf

Some PBS coverage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEoKXKUnLsY
PBS transcript
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11162007/transcript5.html?print
more PBS info
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11162007/profile2.html
Info related to Providence Equity (where a former FCC chair went)
www.sungarddx.com/pdf/Data_Exchange_Fundraising.pdf

Loud commercials have been addressed before. If the ad agency has used aggressive audio processing, and uses less energy at bass frequencies, the station actually needs special equipment to sense the higher average energy and compensate. The peak voltage value can be the same with a large difference in loudness.

To those that think so-called market forces make things good, explain why we've now got those half-hour infomercials, 18+ minutes of ads an hour instead of 9 to 11, and far less depth and diversity in news coverage. The same former FCC chair that Bill Moyers talks about taking a job at a major communications-oriented venture capital group has since become head of the cable-tv industry group that pushed for the Comcast/NBC/Universal merger. Cable companies don't want broadcast tv to be excellent.

Yes, the public has been ignored, research even ordered destroyed when it didn't support the pre-determined outcome.

The story
http://web.archive.org/web/20090123153744/http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/09/18/senator_says_media_study_suppressed/

The suppressed report
http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-267448A1.pdf

Some PBS coverage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEoKXKUnLsY
PBS transcript
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11162007/transcript5.html?print
more PBS info
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11162007/profile2.html
Info related to Providence Equity (where a former FCC chair went)
www.sungarddx.com/pdf/Data_Exchange_Fundraising.pdf

Loud commercials have been addressed before. If the ad agency has used aggressive audio processing, and uses less energy at bass frequencies, the station actually needs special equipment to sense the higher average energy and compensate. The peak voltage value can be the same with a large difference in loudness.

To those that think so-called market forces make things good, explain why we've now got those half-hour infomercials, 18+ minutes of ads an hour instead of 9 to 11, and far less depth and diversity in news coverage. The same former FCC chair that Bill Moyers talks about taking a job at a major communications-oriented venture capital group has since become head of the cable-tv industry group that pushed for the Comcast/NBC/Universal merger. Cable companies don't want broadcast tv to be excellent.

How many of your local schools even offer woodworking clases anymore? Why is that?

It's because they had to cancel the classes because there isn't money for new tools or wood, and to make room for more essential courses like science and math, as mandated by federal laws (see NCLB and its impact on time spent on non-core subject courses).

And math? Well, math is just too hard for kids! We can't damage their self-esteem by making them learn something that's HARD! Reading/writing? Unnecessary! I knew the school systems were failing when my son told me that he could opt out of reading and writing to take a movie appreciation class. That's right - instead of learning how to read or how to structure clear, concise sentences, the school would let him watch movies and talk about them. Clearly equivalent!

I'd say this is more of a specific instance for whatever school your son attends, instead of a nationwide thing. I've never seen a change-out from reading comprehension to film appreciation, unless you're talking about the generic 'humanities' requirement at the junior-college level. . . in which case it's not really the schools fault. . .

Anyone who doesn't think that the US is failing to prepare children for leadership clearly wasn't paying attention as George W. Bush ran this country into the ground for 8 years!

Umm no? I'm not defending that ape, I'm just saying that it started a loooooonnnnngggg time before Bush 1 got in office, let alone Bush 2.

See if you can figure out why this American citizen was killed.

In essence he received the same treatment legally as these other Americans shot down en mass by the Federal government. All completely legal, and correct. Their leader even asked for that treatment. Go figure.

Actually war is a state that can be entered between two nations.

There is apparently a flaw in your reasoning somewhere. Bin Laden declared war on the US on behalf of Al Qaeda in 1996, after which they conducted numerous attacks, killing many thousands of Americans. Eventually the US responded with an Authorization for Use of Military Force against those who committed 9/11, and then attacked back, killing or capturing thousands or more of Al Qaeda. Somehow, what you declared impossible has happened. How do you think that is? Hint - a flaw in your thinking.

Terrorism, beside not being a country is a very unclear label.

Exploding a car bomb in a busy market or shopping area is pretty clear. Membership in a particular terrorist organization is even clearer.

(You do realize, that the Founding Fathers, nowadays would be labeled Terrorists, right?)

No, they wouldn't. They would be rebels, as they were at the time to the British crown, not terrorists. You are completely wrong there.

Wars are a special case obviously— but INITIATING war is pretty fucking tyrannical in the first place.

Free clue: Bin Laden's Fatwa

A year and a half ago I watched a public television show which documented the creation of compatible organs. They stripped an incompatible mouse heart of all but the scaffold which was translucent and then seeded it with stem sells from the mouse they wanted to transplant it into. The cells grew into heart cells and the heart started beating in the lab environment. When transplanted into the mouse it worked fine. They suggested that the same thing could be done with pigs hearts to make them compatible with humans as the scaffold was not what the immune system of the body attacked. Not sure if this has already been done. They also used an inkjet head on a 3D printer to print a mouse heart of the scaffold material, seeded it with stem cells, and it started beating in the lab environment. As I recall, they had also done the similar things with lungs, kidneys, and other body parts. This was the show. "Replacing Body Parts" Aired January 26, 2011 on PBS http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/replacing-body-parts.html Transcript on the website.

Something like 98%

Really, now? Most goods fabricated from metals are capital goods and are in use for many years. Buildings are in use for longer than that, those that use metals anyway. Besides, you have not really looked at demand and availability, haven't you? Just looking at annual production rates will show that we need more than we'll ever be able to recycle, even if we recycle 100%, which is, of course, ridiculous proposition. At the least we'll need to keep the furnaces, no?

We're running out of reserves of at least the following: gold, silver and platinum-group metals, zinc, tin, indium, zirconium, cadmium, tungsten, copper, manganese, nickel and molybdenum. There are metals like gallium, germanium and scandium that are not produced separately, but as part of the extraction process for other metals. Once the extraction process stops, they become unavailable, because it is not efficient to produce them separately. And when I say "efficient", I mean "energy efficient", not "economically efficient". We'll need more energy than we have available to mine or recycle those. This isn't news, either.

So, while you can dream about "technologies of abundance", the sad truth is that nothing magical is available to humanity at present, and that only careful resource allocation will help us cross the threshold from the wanton and reckless growth of the past 100 years into a sustainable model that can carry us forward in the medium, long and very long run. The alternative is a collapse of the civilization.

Unfortunately, a careful resource allocation won't happen in a market economy, which tends to heavily discount events that are two generations away, so we'll likely see a serious economic collapse and probably a major war or three within our times. Incidentally, the US policies in the Middle East in the past 20 years have nicely set up the stage for one of those.

But in (wrongly) contesting a minor point, you've drifted too far away from the topic of the article, which is the destruction of the biosphere and what it means for the human civilization, and in what little attention you try to give to the topic, you misunderstand it completely.

When I say we have no technological fixes to the biodiversity problem, I mean (as I said repeatedly) that we simply cannot restore fast enough what we destroy. There is a lot of information about the extinction rates human development has brought about, and I am sure you can google, bing or duckduckgo it, but here is one reference: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/extinction/massext/statement_03.html . The situation with the biosphere is not immoral, it is beyond hope.

As I said already, every time such a rate of species extinctions in an ecosystem had come about, the ecosystem had collapsed, and when it did it took something on the order of 10-15 million years for it to recover, during which time, as you aptly noted, most of the life forms that survived were bacteria. What "technologies of abundance" does the humanity have at present or available within a few decades to counter this? Nothing, even assuming that our research infrastructure and institutions will continue to work in the face of a looming crisis intact, which they won't. This will be the end of our civilization, unless we recast ourselves as Terminators, for which, regretfully, we don't have enough titanium.

Would better shovels be a "technological fix" to this? Your irony is totally out of place, but without it this is a good question that merits a serious answer. The answer is, unfortunately, hardly. Even if you learn to replant faster, you will not be recreating a biosphere with a balanced ecology, and the shovels won't replace the gone species. There is no tech that can do that, nor there is one on the horizon.

The trees won't grow faster, and evolution in the new forests will not work faster, so Mother Nature will not be able to compe

So, for the tl;dr crowd, I agree with many of your points, but you miss the big picture on solar PV in a big way. It is inconsistent for you to predict forward pessimistic trends while dismissing optimistic ones. The truth is more that both sets of trends are happening together, and we need to make related political and economic choices. More on that below.

You make some good points, and I agree that much of what humanity is doing to our nature world is both immoral and short sighted. One point of the Gaia essay is to address the assumptions of those who think keeping things just the way they are is "natural", when any inspection of natural history shows how much change is constantly going on -- as well as to suggest hat those who claim to speak for Gaia may have taken a rather narrow short-term view of things.

You're also correct that a technological possibility does not mean that something is proven, and indeed almost all those more exotic technologies including space habitats would require significant investment. However, given the world GDP is around US$70 trillion a year, and it has been suggested we are just $100 billion dollars away from hot fusion and such, there is plenty of resources potentially to invest in alternative technologies (including space) if we collectively wanted to. But instead we use up much of the surplus that could go into resolving these problems when we collectively put trillions of dollars a year into military spending, and then trillions more into "guarding" of other sorts -- and worse, get most of our best and brightest to devote all their time, emotion, and imagination to think up even better ways to kill people, disrupt their infrastructure (like with Stuxnet), to create computer software that competes in a zero sum financial game on wall street, and so on. So, in many ways we are probably much closer to agreement than you might think at first.

The place where I most strongly have to disagree with you though, beyond your assumption that we are running out of metal given how recyclable it is even from landfills, is when you write something like: "We have no solar power tech that can deploy in space and provide cheap energy to the Earth, and the one we use on Earth is manufactured cheaply only in places where the environment is the victim."

Have you spent any time investigating this? Seriously investigating what is going on? Did you twenty years ago, or even ten, look at the exponential growth of solar energy and the reduction of costs and predict the implications forward in the same way you are willing to project forward a notion of unchecked environmental damage? If not, why not? Why pay attention only to doomster trends and ignore optimistic ones? If you had looked into PV optimistically, you would see that, at market prices, the cost of solar energy from PV is generally now cheaper in the non-industrialized world than any other form of energy, and the cost of PV power is rapidly approaching grid parity in the industrialized world (as in, the head of GE R&D says by 2015 or so).

And further, if we include the costs of externalities, like remediating pollution, like dealing with the health consequences of air pollution, the cost of economic uncertainty, and the cost of military spending to secure long oil supply lines, renewables have been *cheaper* in real economic terms since at least the 1970s? The only reason we still use fossil fuels is political; they are way more expensive financially than renewables, all things considered. This is the fundamental thing most resource doomsters do not understand, in part because their is a vast legion of highly-paid mainstream economists involved in denying this every day in every way possible.

As Jimmy Carter said in 1979:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/carter-crisis/
"We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warne

This is another example of ESR ignoring the dangers of closed-source software in his devotion to "pragmatism." There is always a role for the monks of society, and RMS is the monk of free software. It's relatively easy to be a pragmatist. It takes something special to be a monk.

I don't live like RMS, but I find his insights to be important. The dystopian future from The Right to Read, especially, is being carried out in terms of years instead of decades. The secret to RMS's "fanaticism" is his long-term planning. Pragmatism seems to work now, but sooner or later closed-source is going to hurt you.

The elevator example is not that good. ESR has forgotten about elevator breakdowns. Elevators also usually include surveillance and phone-home equipment, which have implications for reliability, privacy, and vendor lock-in.

The microwave example is not that good, either. Many modern microwaves have an insanely complicated user interface, and I wouldn't mind replacing it with a more intuitive one. Not to mention what silly things you could do with a microwave if you could network it.

This is mostly a myth.

Hardly. Tuition has increased over 400% since 1985, and doubled in the last decade. Your link plays the "lies, damn lies and statistics" game by talking about how scholarships and grants have increased while leaving out the fact that not everyone has access to the same scholarships and grants.

And of course fuel, housing and health care costs have exploded right along with tuition, while wages have stagnated or declined. And that was before the crash in 2008.

My parents helped with room and board; not tuition. They weren't especially wealthy. This strikes me as quite reasonable.

Don't you mean room and board and utilities and food? A few thousand dollars in subsidy a year that many other students didn't have? Nah, I'm sure that had nothing to do with you being able to graduate debt-free compared to those other students.

The grand total would have been about $20k for four years (ending in 1997).

In 1997? Like I said, you're speaking from an entirely separate universe from today's college grads. Tuition was far cheaper, and it was relatively easy to find a job as it was at the height of the tech bubble. You're like somebody in California bragging about how quickly he paid off his house, without mentioning that he bought it before the passage of Prop 13.

How does having a $400/mo loan payment affect my ability to compete in the job market? If I had that kind of obligation I'd live more frugally than I might otherwise. My need to live frugally would have no bearing on my ability to get hired and perform well in a job.

How does it not? No matter how little you are willing to work for, an even more frugal worker from India can undercut your lowest acceptable salary by almost five thousand dollars a year.

You make an excellent argument for not attending a public university in California.

You're making an excellent attempt to avoid the point: that expensive tuition rates are hardly limited to "top" schools. If this were only a matter of students being able to afford to get in Haaaarvaaard or the Vietnamese equivalent, this wouldn't be an issue.

We're not talking about call centers in India.

You skipped over the key word: "there's a reason that so many call centers are located in India". And that reason is the fact that India was a British Colony, which means that English is still a commonly taught language in Indian schools.

And did you notice the dichotomy in your storyline? We should open our borders to many educated foreign workers. But we don't really have to worry about many foreign workers taking jobs here because not that many will have sufficient fluency in English.

Which one is it?

Most, while fluent, still can't communicate as well as native speakers.

"Most" is mostly not relevant when you're talking about a couple of countries with a couple billion people between them. India's middle class alone is the size of the entire U.S. population.

For the kinds of positions I'm talking about, yes we are.

No. We're not. Manufacturing has largely moved offshore, but you don't need a masters to stamp widgets on an assembly line. The overwhelming majority of goods are designed in the United States, which means the overwhelming majority of employees of those businesses are Americans.

Which, again, will all be solved by your brilliant proposal to let foreigners compete for American jobs without Americans having the benefit of foreign costs of living - an issue you don't seem to be interested

I just discovered the joys of podcasting their shows, which is a great way to consume non-news radio. This is terrible news.

I'll really miss Tom and Ray. I even thought they were great in their Nova special on the car of the future

Since the primary reason to go to Delphi was to get advice from the Oracle, what do you do if you consider the Oracle unreliable?

Except that it does in fact deal perfectly well with 'irreducible complexity' and entropy, and is a 'theory' in the same sense that gravity is a 'theory.' To point to the creationist's favorite misunderstanding, an eye is not 'irreducibly complex' because it is perfectly possible for structures necessary to reach the current state to evolve away after their function is superseded by later development. Try watching a little PBS.

I don't think Microsoft will actually be able to do what the article is worried about - and it probably requires a history lesson on how the PC (and PC "clones") came about in the first place to fully explain "why" - but I'll just point everyone at Triumph of the Nerds

and does anyone remember IBM's "microchannel"?

the lesson from Microchannel was that people don't HAVE to pay you royalties just because you are the industry leader and come up with something new - they can form a gang of nine and do it another way...

this sounds a lot like Microsoft saying "pay us and get in the box" - I don't think they have that kind of power (and if you were working on PC's in the mid-late 90's you probably saw IBM PS/2's getting sold by the skid to be melted down for the gold in the connectors MCA used)

Shelley's "Ozymandias" is probably relevant ("My name is Microsoft, king of software/Look on my operating systems, ye competitiors, and despair") :-)

Frontline's eight year old documentary called The Persuaders (specifically chapter 5, though it's all quite interesting) showed the pollsters going door to door, but before knocking they got all your data from Axciom or Lexis so they could tell you EXACTLY what you want to hear. Disingenuous? Nahh, it's just politics.

2. Computers have shown that the neat evolutionary trees that get drawn up are in fact based on imaginary relations of similarity and difference that owe more to the human mind's tendency to perceive patterns than to the raw biological data.

...and physics is the study of frictionless elephants whose mass can be ignored. Are those "neat evolutionary trees" trees actually used by biologists or are they simplifed examples given in popular accounts?

4. ...the evolution of present-day organisms from their supposed ancestors are in fact highly conjectural if not downright false. ... And even the emergence of one species from another has never been directly observed by science.

Not so.

5. ...(Evolution) remains incapable of explaining how anything could evolve that doesn't make biological sense when incomplete. The wings of birds are the classic example: what good is half of one?

Well, at least you didn't dredge up the eye here.... Presumably you don't mean "half of one", you mean "something halfway towards one", well, then....

7. The data used to support evolution are neither experiments nor repeatable, nor can they be, since the origin of species on earth was a unique event.

"The origin of species on earth" is a process, not an event. Yes, evolutionary biology, like geology, is a "historical" science, so it makes "retrodictions", but....

I live in Belgrade, Serbia, and Tesla is revered as god here. For a person who only spent a night in Belgrade (he was born in what is now Croatia but was of Serbian ethnicity), it's a bit strange he got major boulevard and airport named after him. He is also on our money and has a number of monuments.

We also have a Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, which I recommend everybody visit. It has working examples of some of his inventions, so you can see what the first radio controlled device looked like.

I don't mind it though, he was a brilliant mind. Of course, sometimes he was out of touch with reality and had no sense of business, but geniuses often are like that...

If you can find this series subtitled and want to learn more about the life of Tesla, I strongly recommend watching this.