Should a scientist, such as yourself, be "pro" anything other than pro-scientific method and perhaps peer review?
I am pro-AGW in the same manner as I am pro-evolutionary biology, pro-heliocentric theory and pro-general/special relativity. The evidence that we have very strongly supports these scientific theories.
Consider for example how science treats dissenters such as Michael Behe. When a scientist points out valid problems in papers discussing evolution
Very very bad example. Behe *is* a creationist. His view of biology and creationism/evolution is faulty at the least and intentionally dishonest at worst. The Intelligent Design movement is a perfect example of what happens when there's plenty of backscrating going on and little if any actual peer review.
Someone want to remind me why I should trust the IPCC (or climate "science") again?
Well if it makes you feel any better, I don't trust the magnitude of the projected warming by the IPCC; instead of upward of 4 degrees it's probably between 1 and 1.5 degrees. The solutions proposed are also highly suspect from both an economic and environmental standpoint.
when you are releasing a document what you want people to base spending TRILLIONS of dollars on, this is unacceptable.
Agreed.
I'm betting this was a case of it actualy being proof read, and the reader being so caught up in the fever of global warming religion, they didn't think anything of such a wild claim. and that's typical of this fad, where you don't need to sanity check anything if it's linked to global warming.
If that were true, I'd suspect that we'd see a whole lot more screaming about how 2035 is the correct value regardless of the fact that the real estimate is ~2350.
This could just be a case where traffic is routed through different proxies at nearly the same time by a relatively small group of computers or Something coordinated many different machines to connect to their server(s) like a botnet.
As far as I can tell, the typo wasn't in the research paper but in the subsequent re-phrasings by various groups. FTA:
The IPCC apparently sourced its forecast on a 2005 publication by the World Wildlife Fund. The WWF itself had picked it up from a 1999 magazine article based on a phone interview with an Indian scientist.
*That* is what is so damning about the entire ordeal. The IPCC republished the figure from an article by the WWF which wrote their piece based on an article in a magazine which was based on a phone conversation with a scientist. It was a shoddy and completely unacceptable comedy of errors by the IPCC. I say this as a pro-AGW scientist myself; they really ought to be ashamed of themselves.
I am curious how and by whom you think actually discovered the flaw in the IPCC's claims. Science requires that scientific work, claims, publications etc. undergo some degree of peer review which is exactly what happened. The IPCC made a claim which was analyzed and corrected by a scientist. Error correction is one of the most remarkable traits of science that is completely absent in its alternatives (pseudoscience, political infighting etc.)
Social security has functioned as long as it has because every 10 years or so, the fund is tweaked. Raise the retirement age a year or two, increase the tax withheld, raise the cap on SS taxable income etc. Social security tax is running a surplus right now but the vast majority of that is funneled into the federal budget.
Anything over 100,000 or so a year isn't taxed for Medicare/Social security. At ~15% up to 100,000 that's ~15,000 in taxes which to them is a nearly irrelevant sum. As for taxes on their sold shares, I believe that the IRS considers it taxable as capital gains which incurrs a tax of 20% (after the Bush tax cut sunsets)
Why does it matter if the founders are contributing to SS?
It goes to show how Social Security tax is not only fundamentally flawed but regressive as well. It's a tax that mostly affects everyone except those with high wealth/income.
but on the other hand they seem to keep winning in the courts. Doesn't the definition of a patent troll include suing people with nonsense lawsuits?
Those two concepts are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to win in the courts despite a lawsuit being garbage.
They seem to have come up with some ideas so critical to memory that everyone else in the industry can't seem to make a product without tripping over the patent law.
Patent trolls often get an overly broad patent accepted by the USPTO that covers much more than it should in same cases making it nearly impossible to have a competitive design that doesn't infringe a patent somewhere. Ideally, our patent system would do exactly what it was supposed to: encourage the development of the sciences and R&D in general but in many cases, the system is corrupt, even broken, so while a company filing a patent suit may be technically following the law, that doesn't necessarily mean that the company isn't a troll.
Good point. The electrical leads used in a typical pacemaker may very well be vulnerable to such a pulse. If the EMP is powerful enough to fry the microprocessor in a car I'd bet that it is also powerful enough to at least temporarily disrupt the function of someone's pacemaker.
Wake me up when it can complete and environmental impact assessment, defeat a coalition of concerned propertyholders suing because they don't want your "electrosmog" causing cancer, defeat a slimy local developer who really wants a route changed to improve the value of his land holdings, and then cajole the low-bidding contractor into actually building the network properly....
I would imagine that if the slime mold were forced to deal with such problems and it was large enough to do so, it would just eat them. Which actually is not a bad solution.:)
Robot actors, doctors, teachers etc. all would likely be more personable/likable with a human form and appearance. I'm sure you can imagine a humanoid robot being a bit more comfortable to be around than something out of the terminator series at the doctor's office as an example. The point of humanoid robots likely goes beyond being a cute-bot or any of the examples I've used.
Assuming this can be done efficiently enough to take large scale, wouldn't this actually contribute to global warming?
It's better than burning billions of tons of dirty coal to produce the same amount of power. Any extra warming from making use of this energy is completely dwarfed by several orders of magnitude by the warming caused by the CO2 produced by burning an amount of coal to replace the power from the solar power station.
It costs roughly 10,000$/kg to launch all the materials used in these orbital solar power stations. There is simply no way that it is cheaper to launch solar panels into orbit at that cost than to build a set of mirrors to focus solar energy on to solar panels or using it to crack water using one of the many thermochemical cycles that exist and using that to make fuel or run the produced Hydrogen through a fuel cell.
That is precisely what I was thinking. Converting solar energy to electrical energy and then back into infrared and finally converting that infrared light back into electricity sounds to me to be extremely inefficient. Secondly, the infrared laser would probably need to be pretty powerful to transmit the power to the surface of the Earth which seems dangerous as well. It only takes a laser that has a power of a few watts/cm^2 to set fire to things and here we're talking about much much more power being spread over a presumably small area. Microwave beaming is more efficient and safer as you can use a microwave band that isn't terribly absorbed by the atmosphere or the water that is in living things.
Well then they've done a fine job of ignoring the legal precedent as NewyourkCountryLawyer pointed out in the summary.
Please quote the Constitutional section that so clearly makes those damages unconstitutional.
Sure. United States v. Bajakajian These fines are in violation of the 8th amendment forbiding cruel and in this case, unusual punishment. Charging damages in excess of 10,000 times actual damage caused is far far beyond unconstitutional that it isn't funny.
But if you're going to argue the matter, please get your facts straight... you're obviously misinformed on civics issues,
Pot. Kettle. Black.
Surely you don't believe that the DoJ should just ignore the law of the land?
Oh but that is precisely what they just did. By allowing fines 10,000x actual damages they've completely ignored all of the legal precedent set by the supreme court on the matter in terms of the 8th amendment. That is hardly "following the law of the land."
Slashdot Mirror
I am pro-AGW in the same manner as I am pro-evolutionary biology, pro-heliocentric theory and pro-general/special relativity. The evidence that we have very strongly supports these scientific theories.
Very very bad example. Behe *is* a creationist. His view of biology and creationism/evolution is faulty at the least and intentionally dishonest at worst. The Intelligent Design movement is a perfect example of what happens when there's plenty of backscrating going on and little if any actual peer review.
Well if it makes you feel any better, I don't trust the magnitude of the projected warming by the IPCC; instead of upward of 4 degrees it's probably between 1 and 1.5 degrees. The solutions proposed are also highly suspect from both an economic and environmental standpoint.
Agreed.
If that were true, I'd suspect that we'd see a whole lot more screaming about how 2035 is the correct value regardless of the fact that the real estimate is ~2350.
This could just be a case where traffic is routed through different proxies at nearly the same time by a relatively small group of computers or Something coordinated many different machines to connect to their server(s) like a botnet.
As far as I can tell, the typo wasn't in the research paper but in the subsequent re-phrasings by various groups. FTA:
*That* is what is so damning about the entire ordeal. The IPCC republished the figure from an article by the WWF which wrote their piece based on an article in a magazine which was based on a phone conversation with a scientist. It was a shoddy and completely unacceptable comedy of errors by the IPCC. I say this as a pro-AGW scientist myself; they really ought to be ashamed of themselves.
I am curious how and by whom you think actually discovered the flaw in the IPCC's claims. Science requires that scientific work, claims, publications etc. undergo some degree of peer review which is exactly what happened. The IPCC made a claim which was analyzed and corrected by a scientist. Error correction is one of the most remarkable traits of science that is completely absent in its alternatives (pseudoscience, political infighting etc.)
The VAT tax as well as other forms of consumption taxes are inherently regressive in nature. The APT tax may be a better system.
No matter how common abuses of power are, they should never ever become so mundane as to not be newsworthy.
Social security has functioned as long as it has because every 10 years or so, the fund is tweaked.
Raise the retirement age a year or two, increase the tax withheld, raise the cap on SS taxable income etc.
Social security tax is running a surplus right now but the vast majority of that is funneled into the federal budget.
As a 23 yr old, neither will I.
Maybe so but until the benefits start coming in a few decades down the line, the tax hurts the poor much more than higher incomes.
Anything over 100,000 or so a year isn't taxed for Medicare/Social security. At ~15% up to 100,000 that's ~15,000 in taxes which to them is a nearly irrelevant sum. As for taxes on their sold shares, I believe that the IRS considers it taxable as capital gains which incurrs a tax of 20% (after the Bush tax cut sunsets)
It goes to show how Social Security tax is not only fundamentally flawed but regressive as well. It's a tax that mostly affects everyone except those with high wealth/income.
Indeed. Although I can't really say that anyone really feels nostalgic for the "transparency" of the Bush administration either.
Those two concepts are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to win in the courts despite a lawsuit being garbage.
Patent trolls often get an overly broad patent accepted by the USPTO that covers much more than it should in same cases making it nearly impossible to have a competitive design that doesn't infringe a patent somewhere. Ideally, our patent system would do exactly what it was supposed to: encourage the development of the sciences and R&D in general but in many cases, the system is corrupt, even broken, so while a company filing a patent suit may be technically following the law, that doesn't necessarily mean that the company isn't a troll.
Good point. The electrical leads used in a typical pacemaker may very well be vulnerable to such a pulse. If the EMP is powerful enough to fry the microprocessor in a car I'd bet that it is also powerful enough to at least temporarily disrupt the function of someone's pacemaker.
I would imagine that if the slime mold were forced to deal with such problems and it was large enough to do so, it would just eat them. Which actually is not a bad solution. :)
Maybe the slime mold has been evolving for millions of years and there really isn't much in the way of improvements that can be made.
Robot actors, doctors, teachers etc. all would likely be more personable/likable with a human form and appearance. I'm sure you can imagine a humanoid robot being a bit more comfortable to be around than something out of the terminator series at the doctor's office as an example. The point of humanoid robots likely goes beyond being a cute-bot or any of the examples I've used.
I'm sure you could build some really cool mirrors to focus solar power on to some soalr panels for less than that.
It's better than burning billions of tons of dirty coal to produce the same amount of power. Any extra warming from making use of this energy is completely dwarfed by several orders of magnitude by the warming caused by the CO2 produced by burning an amount of coal to replace the power from the solar power station.
It costs roughly 10,000$/kg to launch all the materials used in these orbital solar power stations. There is simply no way that it is cheaper to launch solar panels into orbit at that cost than to build a set of mirrors to focus solar energy on to solar panels or using it to crack water using one of the many thermochemical cycles that exist and using that to make fuel or run the produced Hydrogen through a fuel cell.
That is precisely what I was thinking. Converting solar energy to electrical energy and then back into infrared and finally converting that infrared light back into electricity sounds to me to be extremely inefficient. Secondly, the infrared laser would probably need to be pretty powerful to transmit the power to the surface of the Earth which seems dangerous as well. It only takes a laser that has a power of a few watts/cm^2 to set fire to things and here we're talking about much much more power being spread over a presumably small area. Microwave beaming is more efficient and safer as you can use a microwave band that isn't terribly absorbed by the atmosphere or the water that is in living things.
Well then they've done a fine job of ignoring the legal precedent as NewyourkCountryLawyer pointed out in the summary.
Sure. United States v. Bajakajian These fines are in violation of the 8th amendment forbiding cruel and in this case, unusual punishment. Charging damages in excess of 10,000 times actual damage caused is far far beyond unconstitutional that it isn't funny.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
Oh but that is precisely what they just did. By allowing fines 10,000x actual damages they've completely ignored all of the legal precedent set by the supreme court on the matter in terms of the 8th amendment. That is hardly "following the law of the land."