Slashdot Mirror

we need your help

About a month ago, I started sounding optimistic about getting a bill introduced into Congress to help right the wrong of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. I was optimistic because we had found a congressperson who was willing to introduce the bill. But after pressure from lobbyists, that is no longer clear. And so we need help to counter that pressure, and to find a sponsor.

The idea is a simple one: Fifty years after a work has been published, the copyright owner must pay a $1 maintanence fee. If the copyright owner pays the fee, then the copyright continues. If the owner fails to pay the fee, the work passes into the public domain. Based on historical precedent, we expect 98% of copyrighted works would pass into the public domain after just 50 years. They could keep Mickey for as long as Congress lets them. But we would get a public domain.

The need for even this tiny compromise is becoming clearer each day. Stanford's library, for example, has announced a digitization project to digitize books. They have technology that can scan 1,000 pages an hour. They are chafing for the opportunity to scan books that are no longer commercially available, but that under current law remain under copyright. If this proposal passed, 98% of books just 50 years old could be scanned and posted for free on the Internet.

Stanford is not alone. This has long been a passion of Brewster Kahle and his Internet Archive, as well as many others. Yet because of current copyright regulation, these projects -- that would lower the cost of libraries dramatically, and spread knowledge broadly -- cannot go forward. The costs of clearing the rights to makes these works available is extraordinarily high.

Yet the lobbyists are fighting even this tiny compromise. The public domain is competition for them. They will fight this competition. And so long as they have the lobbyists, and the rest of the world remains silent, they will win.

We need to your help to resist this now. At this stage, all that we need is one congressperson to introduce the proposal. Whether you call it the Copyright Term Deregulation Act, or the Public Domain Enhancement Act, doesn't matter. What matters is finding a sponsor, so we can begin to show the world just how extreme this debate has become: They have already gotten a 20 year extension of all copyrights just so 2% can benefit; and now they object to paying just $1 for that benefit, so that no one else might compete with them.

If you believe this is wrong, here are two things you can do: (1) Write your Representative and Senator, and ask them to be the first to introduce this statute; point them to the website http://eldred.cc, and ask them to respond. And even more importantly, (2) blog this request, so that others who think about these issues can get involved in the conversation.

I have given this movement as much as I can over the past four years, and I will not stop until we have reclaimed the public domain. Stay tuned for more litigation, and more ideas from Creative Commons. But please take these two steps now.

I just wish Larry would mention Gutenberg more...

This idea is discussed in Larry Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (which was actually reviewed here on slashdot, according to the cover). Subscribors to this myth often say that the architecture of the Internet doesn't permit control, that the ability to anonymously browse the Web, to trade files and information without oversight or responsibility to the authorities, guarantees that the Internet will always be free.

"This is the fallacy of 'is-ism'" writes Lessig, "to confuse how something is with how it must be." Lessig claims that encroaching commerce, as much as legislation, can and does change the architechture of the 'Net to permit control (and in some of his other works points to this as the means of strong intellectual property controls, privacy invasion, and the like).

Lessig seems to see this as largely a bad thing (certainly the Passport vulnerability teaches us the risk of such designs), but clearly the flip side is that if digital certificates became the norm and senders had to take more responsibility for their emails, we would combat spam more effectively. This is not the only benefit; digital certificates would help deal with fraud on auctions like EBay and permit greater security across the 'Net.

I personally agree that the 'Net should be less regulated and should be a free exchange of ideas; if a nation with especially strict rules attempts to limit its part of the Internet, all of us are affected. But clearly the 'Net can be regulated, and there may even be situations where it should be so.

On another note, from the standpoint of Constitutional law, it is fairly innacurate to compare commercial speech like spam to political, individual, or artistic speech, which all earn strong First Amendmant protection and for which strict scrutiny must be met to limit those freedoms. Limitations to commercial speech, in contrast, must only meet intermediate scrutiny (a reasonable governmental interest rather than a compelling one), as evidenced by FTC regulations on advertisements and the like, regulations which would not stand against political activism and the like.

I found these other papers from Stanford from last year that talk about other aspects of "personalized" PageRank, so it looks like there are a whole range of approaches to making this thing work:

• Scaling Personalized Search
• Topic-Sensitive PageRank

I found these other papers from Stanford from last year that talk about other aspects of "personalized" PageRank, so it looks like there are a whole range of approaches to making this thing work:

• Scaling Personalized Search
• Topic-Sensitive PageRank

The search results for "pagerank" on the group's server is useful: search results

I suggest reading the original research paper. It gives a very nice overview of how it actually works. It is very clever, but it is not magic. Mostly, they managed to come up with an approach that is very robust against manipulation, even if the would-be manipulators were aware of the internals.

There is no need to hypothesize conspiracy.

I studied under the SCCM program at Stanford, and started the same year as Sepandar Kamvar. I remember him as a great guy, very smart, and an EXCEPTIONALLY good speaker and tutor (I was always pestering him for explanations of the week's lectures).

I'm glad to hear his research is getting attention, and I hope others who are interested in the theoretical aspects of data mining and web search engines will take a look at the SCCM and statistics programs at Stanford (shameless plug - other can post pointers to similar programs).

Then, I bought a bunch of 10/100 Ethernet cards that had EEPROM sockets and used EtherBoot to create a boot image for it. You can also make a boot image on the web here, here, or here .

You'll need a way to program the EEPROM, but there are lots of places to get info about that.

The only directories that are not identical across the virtual machines are /etc, /var, along with the obvious /dev, /boot, /proc, and so on. /usr and /home are the same mount on each "machine."

Blaise Pascal (the Pascal that the language was named for, so yes, this is a "nerd post" :-) asked centuries ago, "Are you better off if you act as if there is a God, whether or not there actually is?"

This question is generally called Pascal's Wager, and the answer he came to was, "Yes."

-Dejaffa

This seems to be the author of SHRDLU's home page. Even the source code for SHRDLU (a kind of natural language processor) can be found there, along with a dialog from a demo run.

If you have some specific references to other rebuttals please post them, they'd be most welcome on my reading list.

Maybe not quite a rebuttal, but McCarthy home page contains descriptions of nonmonotonic reasoning systems which, while logical, are not context-free.

I think because, like most AI-demos, it only appears to work until you try it yourself. Here's a critique from 1994-- the impression I get is that to answer any question correctly it has to have the answer spelled out in advance, its inference mechanisms just don't cut it.

My take is that its knowledge-representation doesn't really converge on a kernel of most-important-facts-- if it did, it wouldn't get lost wandering among all the little details.

We're actually having a somewhat-related discussion on comp.ai just now.

You guys are all missing the point. If you have a software radio you have something that is inherently able to adapt to the spectral environment that it currently "sees". Develop logic that deals with interference, and you've eliminated the concept of management bands and spectrum management agencies. You've essentially automated the process that these agencies seek to fufill, and you've eliminated the politics, lobbying mechanisms and the grip that the old world broadcast industry has on the raw resource that should be essentially free for everyone to use.

Some people may argue that you've taken revenue (licensing) away from central government. That is true. But my belief is that Central Government should be focussing on developing innovative smart technology rather than maintaining archaic processes. Revenue through process rather than red-tape.

Are radiowaves the electromagnetic equivalent of GNU bandwidth?

Check here and here for clue.

somewhere in texas, a village is missing it's idiot

Also, semiconductor manufacturing uses lots of quite nasty chemicals and while the organics can be incinerated, the heavy metals are difficult to dispose of safely for the long term and there is always the inevitable discharge of toxic pollutants into the air or water surrounding the factory.

Finally, both manufacturing and operating computers use lots of electricity, which is usually generated by plants that produce lots of greenhouse gases.

Besides worrying about recycling, you also want to worry about all these environmental costs.

What's with the weird profile angle or this obviously staged photo of Larry thinking. I like Larry Lessig's ideas a lot but maybe if he got some better photography he would win more Supreme court cases ;)

OK, how is this different from the scripts in /etc/rc.d that can start, stop, or restart all my system services? Any daemon process needs this feature, right? It doesn't help if the machine has locked up entirely.

OK, how is this different from the scripts in /etc/rc.d that can start, stop, or restart all my system services? Any daemon process needs this feature, right? It doesn't help if the machine has locked up entirely.

Programming / Hacking is neither and art or a science and yet it is both. If you don't program you probably would not understand, but if you've ever implemented your own b-tree in an application, you'll probably agree. Most likely, whether or not you agree depends on what type of software you have written in the past.

Art and science are probably closer than most people believe. Leonardo da Vinci painted some of the most astounding scenes ever painted; yet, he also studied science, literature, and the Christian bible. Many mathematicians would say that math is an art, heck there are probably some artists that believe art is a science.

Knuth says that computer programming is an art, but I dare you to read his books and claim they are devoid of science.

In short... It's all depends on the application.

Don't dismiss origami immediately - it could have implications for things like protein folding.

And download folding@home while you're attention's in this vicinity.

The above author may have just been kidding, but if the footage is interesting and you do post it up to a Freenet-like digital library, then your content may just be around for more than the lifespan of a VCR tape or yet another DV codec. Check out LOCKSS for more info.

If SARS has a mortality rate of 5% (we'll give a conservative estimate) and infects 10% of the American population, that's 1.3 million deaths in America alone. And most likely, the mortality rate would rise as the hospitals are overwhelmed.

The current state of e-mail makes a tax impossible. It gives anyone the freedom to set up a mail server anywhere they want. You could easily set up two mail servers at home and send mail back and forth between them and no IRS official would know either exists.

If the federal government wanted to collect a tax on e-mail there is only one way I can conceive to do it - a way that would not make U.S. e-mail incompatible with that of the rest of the world. It could force individuals and businesses use ISP-supplied SMTP servers as relays, and then change ISP behavior by requiring them to tally outgoing mail from their customers, while also blocking SMTP traffic that doesn't use the relay. This requires no changes in the SMTP protocol, but is a major change to the information infrastructure in the U.S., and probably not worth the tax revenue it would generate. It would also be an incredible pain.

I'm not against taxes, I just don't think you can tax e-mail without ruining it. I like Larry Lessig's idea better.

Not peer reviewed?!?

Lists of errors and amendments can be downloaded as plain TeX files or read from DVI files or PostScript files cited on the relevant web pages. You are entitled to a reward of at least $2.56 if you are the first person to report a bona-fide error not on those lists. Each page tells you how to report an error for the book in question.

I don't know of anyone wha has cashed on of those checks yet :)

This is just an anti-libertarian rant/flame from some disgruntled control freak. Ignore it and move on.


You should know that this is Lawrence Lessig of Eldred v. Ashcroft fame (challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act). He's not some nut-job that should just be dismissed. This doesn't mean his ideas are good or should be used, but I'll give you 10-to-1 that he has answers to your questions. They may not satisfy you, but I don't think it's very safe to assume that a Stanford Law professor, with significant experience arguing before the Supreme Court can't handle your questions.

Clearly it's novel, if absolutely no one did it, while such technology existed for a long time, and no one did it. It most definitely has utility, it is useful.

Now the last standard is this: non-obvious

Now go all the way to the bottem of that, and we might see what the problem is...Looks like the patent office, has a problem with web-based technology. If you can't find documentation where you take an idea from documents A, B, and C, and get the idea in the patent. What if the problem is, it's the god damn web, and it's all oral tradition?

You might have a case for non-obvious, but clearly a judge didn't agree with Barnes and Noble on the point. Now it might be obvious to most people now, but was it obvious in 1996-7 when they applied for that patent. Not sure, I didn't know enough about the web at the time to have been considered an expert in the area. At the time, I didn't know what a cookie was.

I think the Internet is too much of a land grab at the moment, and that too many simple basic ideas right now are coming out, which make things tricker on the internet.

Again, I'm still standing up being a devil's Advocate. I really, really wish, that it was just over.

I think that concept of saying: "Put it on my tab", existed in the real world for a long time, and that this is merely an application of such an idea to the internet. I think that the referral business relationship where by Amazon pays you a piece of the pie if the referral comes from your website, and the associated technology is stupid. I think that saying, well I'm going to automate my process using a computer, shouldn't be patentable, however, doing that falls well within the definition of what is patentable.

I'm trying to say what Lessig says so much better: Read it here

Before a flight, Montgomery programs into a laptop computer the path that he wants the aircraft to follow. This information then is downloaded into the airplane's onboard computer. After placing the plane on the runway and starting the engine, he pushes a single button, the aircraft takes off, flies the preprogrammed course and then lands all by itself.

Averaged over a kilometer course, the deviation in the aircraft's position from the programmed course was typically less than 0.5 meter horizontally, 0.25 meter vertically and 0.25 meters per second in air speed, Montgomery reported.

"Carrier differential GPS is accurate enough for most purposes, so you don't need a lot of expensive equipment," he said.

Most mathematicians and computer scientists use a program called TeX to typeset their papers. TeX takes a .tex file as input and spits out a .dvi file, which can be postprocessed by drivers to produce PostScript or PDF files. TeX was written by professor Donald Knuth of Stanford University; the current version is still essentially similar to the 1983 version!

TeX has a horrible syntax and funky limitations, but there are so many available packages for it (such as LaTeX and the associated packages) as well as external applications (BibTeX) and tons of mathematical files made for it that it just cannot be replaced.

Some crazy people even use TeX to
typeset a newspaper and a personnel directory.

Two points: 1) Berne requires at least 50 years of copyright automatically. 2) What your suggesting is similar to this, albeit slightly more expensive.

rdiff-backup is based on rsync but allows you to keep incrementals as well as full backups. great for disk based backups while maintaining lots of history.

for redundancy and recoverability just use it to multiple backup disks at whatever level of redundancy you need. each one will have its own full set of incrementals so if you lose one, no big deal.

Ah! Of course. Forward Error Correction.

It's a well understood mathematical principle, and is used in networking. Actually, FEC is a little broader than what I mean.

What I am talking about is algorithms for spliting a data packet up into m parts, and allowing recovery of the whole with any n of those m (n < m). For example, one such algorithm is the Tornado code, used by Digital Fountain for multicast file distribution.

Here, the application would be somwhat different. You'd take your private key, and split it into m semi-redundant sections, by, well, any of the FEC algorithms you like. Encrypt each part with the individuals public key, and there you have it.

I'll go back to my information theory stuff, and patch together something.

Thank's for the heads up. It's one of those things that once it's pointed out, it's so clear, I can't believe that I didn't see it before.

Note that this would require m+1 encryptions (1 main key, split over m encrypted sections), and n+1 decryptions (n parts brought together, and the manin key). That's a hefty price, but you want to ensure that no person can see part of the private key. This is because (if you want an n from m stratagy in the first place) you do not completly trust the private key holders, so you do not want to give them part of the major key directly.

Hmm. Come to think of it, most FEC codes currently do not have that as a design criteria (but I reckon that one like that could be found). From memory, however, most of the more sophisticated codes have that as a side effect, which results from the even distribution of data between the m packets.

The only other alternative scheme I thought of ... well wasn't really. I think that there might be something clever that you can do with RSA, by playing around with products of exponents in Fermats Little Theorum. But I've not got round to pusing the algebra around yet.

Forward error correction - damn, but that's so obviously correct.

If I get a fully working algorithm (or, rather, protocol for utilising the algorithms) I'll stick it in my journal.

I was struck by the last link in the Cringely article others have mentioned ( We've Been Framed! ): 1968 NLS demo, which has realplayer clips of this 90 minute demo of the NLS system.

NLS allowed you to create documents which linked to other documents or content, create heirarchical document structures which could expand or collapse, and even was designed to interface with ARPAnet -- the demo shows a program designed to show a list of networks, what services were available on each, their various protocals, etc...

Viewing this really makes clear the debt we owe to our predecessors. So many "innovations" today are simply inevitable considering the work done by our predecessors -- somtimes more than one generation removed!

Does it make any sence to reward or even allow overly-broad patents, especially where there is no concrete implementation or prototype? It would seem that a criteria for gaining a patent should be some repayment of the debt owed to our predecessors -- some tangible contribution back to humanity for the next generation of innovation. Otherwise, you simply encourage people to file patents on things that will be inevitably produced or invented by someone else -- you do *no* work, then collect.

I recall reading about a geneticist who had done some remarkable research, made a name for himself, etc, but no one could replicate his work. It later came out that he merely faked his results, as it was clear to him that someone else would make the break-throughs eventually, and substantiate his work. Not too dissimilar to the patent situation, IMHO.

So, I'd like to see a requirement for patents which mandates a workable prototype or some concrecte research which can eventually be given back to humanity to repay our debt to our predecessors.

a few other good sites include: games.ars, gamegirl advance, games.design.art.culture, got game?, how they got game, ludology, or for regular gaming news, the friendlier ones are bluesnews, gamespy, games are fun and shacknews. where do you go?

http://folding.stanford.edu/faq.html#project.own states:

Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it.

--
Dreamweaver Website Templates

Than that of Dr Donald Knuth. In a bygone era, he would be grave robbing to find parts to bring his creations to life. Fortunately, we was born into the 20th century, and thus has spent his life on programming and algorithms.

Well, aside from the bit, where after he didn't like the typesetting of his first book, he wrote a typesetting language and designed fonts for it, rewrote the book in TeX, a language of much evil and dark arts and had it printed again. Then retired to make it his lifes' work to perfect his books, "The Art of Computer Programming", or TAOCP

Scary but brilliant man -> http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~knuth/faq.html

Also, radio waves are not lasers

Checkout
http://folding.stanford.edu/

This is a distributed computing project to study protein folds for things like Alzheimer's, BSE, and parkinsons, which are caused by misfolded proteins.

They have clients for Linux, MacOS, and Windows. It can run as a console only, or as a screensaver. (Both at lowest priority)

Check out http://folding.stanford.edu/. They aren't researching SARS, but other, IMHO more important problems such as Altzheimer's, BSE (mad cow disease) and general protein research. Also, since it's run by a university, their data is public domain (although they'll probably take credit for your CPU cycles ;) ). Go fold!

I couldn't get to the article but I would assume they use a MASER. So if you conceptualize this as power being transmitted by a LASER then you should understand why interference should not be an issue and that the power does not attenuate according to the inverse square law. As other people have already pointed out though, birds flying into the beam could be killed. It gives new meaning to the phrase 'your goose is cooked'.

It's perfectly reasonable. Xerox PARC's mouse had three buttons. Apple simplified this down to one button. Presumably, some of their justifications for simplifying the mouse are still valid.
Obviously, it kept costs down. Arguably, it was easier to write documentation for a single button mouse.

A multibutton mouse is useful with OSX, as X11 applications have been written with the assumption that a three button mouse would have been available. Similarly, once Microsoft figured out what the hell the right button would be used for, programmers with Windows experience started to import certain UI assumptions into their Mac programs.

In the beginning, the Mac GUI was designed around the assumption that all macs would have single button mice.

Single button mice still have two advantages. There's still no question as to which button must be pressed. And the single button can be made as large as possible, which might reduce RSI.

I suspect that if Apple offered a two button mouse, certain slashdotters would be asking why a three button mouse wasn't offered.

It's perfectly reasonable. Xerox PARC's mouse had three buttons. Apple simplified this down to one button. Presumably, some of their justifications for simplifying the mouse are still valid.
Obviously, it kept costs down. Arguably, it was easier to write documentation for a single button mouse.

A multibutton mouse is useful with OSX, as X11 applications have been written with the assumption that a three button mouse would have been available. Similarly, once Microsoft figured out what the hell the right button would be used for, programmers with Windows experience started to import certain UI assumptions into their Mac programs.

In the beginning, the Mac GUI was designed around the assumption that all macs would have single button mice.

Single button mice still have two advantages. There's still no question as to which button must be pressed. And the single button can be made as large as possible, which might reduce RSI.

I suspect that if Apple offered a two button mouse, certain slashdotters would be asking why a three button mouse wasn't offered.

I would describe it as "they studied", not that "they feared".

When Apple conducted experiments in the late '70s or early '80s, multibutton mice were faster for experienced users, but increased the errors and confusion of inexperenced users. I'm not sure if studies done today would give similar results. The mouse is so commonplace that television comercials for Hewlett Packard use the hypercard's "index finger" mouse pointer to show selection, and children's cartoons like Dora the Explorer emulate the mouse selection metaphor.

It doesn't. He was just trying to sound smart so he could get some karma.

And considering some of the idiots that have posted in respond to my above post so far (in a parallel thread, not this one), I'd just as soon my above remark get modded down to -1.

I hadn't expected my reasoning to require explaining, but a brief synopsis is when you have two potentially guilty parties, and you want one to be forthcoming with evidence to turn the other in, with promise of gain for being the one to snitch, you create what is called the Prisoner Dilemma (sorry... misspelled it before).

"Even still, one would have to assume the planets are all Death Star in size or smaller."

That comment was kind of confusing.

You should be more educated about how the US government takes away your wealth...

Believe me, I am. It's not that I disagree with you; but I have a problem with your statements of fact...

Taking up your challenge, the last two mentions of government subsidies I could find for the USPS were in 1983 and 1991. In that search, I found a recent document that is highly critical of the USPS for a number of reasons, but somehow fails to mention the subsidies you insist are paid to it.

However, for practical purposes, the other "benefits" as you call them which the USPS receives, are, for practical purposes, subsidies.

Please, please, please - I understand your point, and I might even agree with you, if it weren't for your insistance on using a term with a well-defined meaning improperly. The government bailing out the airline industry by giving it 9 billion dollars is a subsidy. The government bailing out the airline industry by giving it a new fleet of planes is a subsidy. If they instead chose to help the airline industry in a different way - by changing legislation to reduce the tax burden for an airline, for example - that is not a subsidy. You could refer to it as a tax break, a tax credit, an amazing hornswoggle, or any number of different things; but calling it a subsidy is about as accurate as calling it a monkey.

Quite frankly, your insistance that the term "subsidy" means something other than what is commonly accepted is a red flag to me. Redefinition of terms is a common tactic used to greater or lesser extent by groups who expect to profit by confusing the issue under discussion.

Media companies would like the internet to be heavily regulated so that things like copyright law can be strongly enforced, whereas tech companies recognize that the unregulated nature of the internet is the very reason that all sorts of innovations can happen on the network. If you think about it, things like napster were very innovative. Never before was it possible to try out new music. I for one never really enjoyed listening to cds in cd stores, trying to decide if the album was worth buying. With napster, though, I could sit in the privacy of my home and try anything.

I think that we have not nearly come close to exploring the possibilities that the internet can offer us. As user interfaces improve and mobile devices become more ubiquituous (i can never spell that, sorry not a native english speaker...kuro5hin has spell checking...) new innovations will spring up that nobody can think of right now...

While I may be inclined to agree with you to a certain extent, if you want to see the effects of having everything nationalised then take a look at the U.K in the 70's. We're still dealing with the effects from a lot of Labour policies in the 60's and 70's. It isn't always a good idea.

As it turns out, as far as I can tell, apparently no federal policy maker (economic or otherwise) has read Milton Friedman's Capitalism & Freedom (making this event quite ironic). Hell, I haven't even read more than half of it yet, and I can probably tell you how fucked up the current state of regulation is. Things which are currently regulated should no longer be, (e.g., post office, etc.). Things which are currently unregulated should be (e.g., MS, cable, etc.). Doesn't anyone read anymore? Or do politicians never escape adolescence when they think they know more than everyone else?

While I may be inclined to agree with you to a certain extent, if you want to see the effects of having everything nationalised then take a look at the U.K in the 70's. We're still dealing with the effects from a lot of Labour policies in the 60's and 70's. It isn't always a good idea.

As it turns out, as far as I can tell, apparently no federal policy maker (economic or otherwise) has read Milton Friedman's Capitalism & Freedom (making this event quite ironic). Hell, I haven't even read more than half of it yet, and I can probably tell you how fucked up the current state of regulation is. Things which are currently regulated should no longer be, (e.g., post office, etc.). Things which are currently unregulated should be (e.g., MS, cable, etc.). Doesn't anyone read anymore? Or do politicians never escape adolescence when they think they know more than everyone else?

software/business methods weren't something the USPTO did by choice, it was forced upon them by court decisions, it was something that inventors and corporations wanted, for good reason, but hasn't really benefited the public good like in other technologies.

I could envision a super-fat pipe being used to mirror a facility to a neighboring (or even geographically-distant) facility along with a system like this.

rdiff-backup saved me when a power supply blew out on a server. Within an hour of the failure, I was back up and running on the backup server. It could have been much faster had I automated the failover...

I have two illustrative quotes for you:

"We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."

Professor Schneider's bio

This quote was in the October 1987 issue of Discover magazine. The statement was quoted by Jonathan Schell, author of a volume entitled "The Fate of the Earth". To give context to the previous quote, Mr. Schell also notes:

"We need to act on theory alone, which is to say on prediction alone. It follows that the reputation of scientific prediction needs to be enhanced. But that can happen, paradoxically, only if scientists disavow the certainty and precision that they normally insist on. Above all, we need to learn to act decisively to forestall predicted perils even while knowing that they may never materialize. We must take action, in a manner of speaking, to preserve our ignorance." [bold added for emphasis]

Mr. Schell is a contributor to the Nation.

I suggest that your bad science is right there. Distilled down, "We'll offer up lies and half-baked exhortations because those dumbasses won't know the difference, and are too stupid to discern the truth or understand us. And who knows, we might be right. But probably not."

I don't like being lied to, but since this issue is religion for one side of the debate, I can hardly imagine that side changing its ways now.

Doesn't change the fact that they are scumbags though.