Correction: I don't know of anyone who argues that changing the forcing would not change the heat content. Again, the only question I have is whether such change is taking place.
Wait... I will amend that. I question whether the forcing is being changed in a way that is consistent with "greenhouse gas" warming models.
But the question is whether such a change in forcing is taking place; not whether such a forcing (IF you assume it exists) would change heat content.
"Its truth is due to conservation of mass-energy, which is also why changing the top of the atmosphere radiative forcing changes the climate's total heat content."
And further, since you want to re-raise an old issue: another fact is that nobody is arguing with you about that. But the fact that you seem to think someone is, calls into question your intelligence.
I do not know anybody who argues that changing radiative forcing can change the heat content. The only question *I* have is whether the forcing is actually being significantly changed.
So, I say again: knock off the bullshit, and stop arguing with me about things I'm not even arguing. All you're doing is proving, yet again, that you're a clueless asshole.
"Another preemptive accusation of dishonesty. Okay, I honestly admit that you very frequently quote inaccurate misinformation."
Nonsense. If you want to talk about "another", this is another distortion of what I actually wrote. I accused nobody of anything.
Fact, not opinion or accusation: the idea that muscle is 3 x as dense as fat is commonly quoted. If you are honest (and not mentally disabled), you WILL admit that.
(I could find hundreds more if I wanted to.) So I wasn't accusing anyone of dishonesty. If anything, I was accusing them of NOT being mentally disabled. I'm wondering a bit about you, though.
"But none of this makes the analogy that "calories in > calories spent = weight gain" false as long as you're in a constant gravitational field."
Which is completely irrelevant to MY comment, which was about consuming more calories but losing inches.
The only accusation I'm making is that you're being an ass and deliberately picking on me, again. Go away. Your comments continue to add nothing to the actual discussion and I don't particularly like being harassed.
"People who reach a conclusion other than yours are dishonest? Is that accusation helpful?"
No, you distorted my words. Or at least my clear meaning.
I did not write "if they don't feel as I do they are dishonest." What I wrote was that if THEY are honest, they will reach the obvious conclusion. The difference may be small, but it exists and it is important.
Very obviously I was stating an opinion, but it is an honest one. The site carries nothing but articles about global warming, and SUPPORTS only one side of that argument. On the whole site. So, "skeptical" it ain't.
"Back then, a patent had one or two pages and described a (mostly mechanical) issue in simple language. Lawyers today make sure that a patent is minimum 50 pages, and some run to more than 1000. The language is extremely formalized and very hard to read for untrained minds. And the issues are so specialized that the average judge would have to train several years in the particular field to understand what the invention is about."
Maybe, but -- though I hate to put it this way -- it's really not that simple. Complexity has little to do with the subject under discussion.
The one-click patent, for example, should never have been awarded because it did nothing new.
Not only must a patent be non-obvious to someone in the relevant field, and not only must there not be "prior art" (someone else already doing something too similar) it must also be an actual invention. That is to say, it has to be or do something completely new. The point made by the court in OP's post is that it was not an invention because it was just two common things, stuck together.
A can opener welded to a crowbar is not patentable, because it doesn't do anything new or in a novel way. It's still just a can opener on one end, and a crowbar on the other. But if you stuck two common things together in such a way that the result does something new, then you have a patentable invention.
If you found a way to make a fan that blows air out of potato chips, in principle that would not be patentable, because you just "stuck together" two existing things; fans and potato chips. It doesn't do anything novel. But if you could build a fan out of potato chips in such a way that it was still edible, you would have a patentable invention because it does something new.
The whole site is evidence that it is biased. Literally. If you look at it in its entirety, and you are objective, you could not honestly reach any other conclusion.
Just the fact that it is called "Skeptical Science", and yet the ONLY topic of discussion anywhere on the site is global warming (or the inappropriately-named "climate change", if you prefer), is pretty good evidence that its title was intended to mislead.
Um... in case you hadn't noticed, it has actually been the Republicans who have been trying to marginalize the idea of CO2 - based warming, not the Democrats.
"The problem with that analogy is that is seems people forget about the fact that a human can start exercising, therefor burning more calories that previously, and lose weight while taking in an even larger amount of calories."
It's actually false in another way. When you begin to get into decent shape, you lose inches but actually GAIN weight, because muscle is 3 x as dense as fat.
Skeptical Science is hardly an unbiased source. Lots of other sources have some rather scathing things to say about "Inconvenient Truth".
Skeptical Science is a propaganda machine. They adopted the "skeptical" monitor in order to try to infiltrate the actual skeptics.
Just sayin'... I'm not claiming they're wrong but like any other obviously biased source, any true skeptic is obligated to take their word with a large grain of salt.
When there is danger of infringing on the rights (which includes contracts) of innocent parties, law enforcement is, at the very least, required to use "narrowly tailored" means to effect their business.
They used pretty much the opposite of "narrowly tailored" means. They just took over the whole hosting company and surveilled ALL the users.
Definitely a no-no. Definitely illegal.
No reasonable person is in favor of child pornography. But law enforcement is not allowed to break the law in order to enforce the law.
"Nonsense. 2.99GJ is simply 1.21GW over 2.47 seconds."
But it's all irrelevant, because OP's main premise is obviously false.
If we want to take the situation even a little bit literally, then a phaser could not be "vaporizing" its target. If it did, there would be a tremendous explosion. In fact, 2.99 GJ worth of "boom".
But we don't see that. Therefore a phaser could not be a "vaporizer" at all. Nor could it be a "molecular dissociation" device because the result could be the same.
I would have to theorize that it was some kind of device to send matter into another dimension, or some such. The energy required for that is completely unknown. It could be only a mJ or two. Who knows?
"What happens is that you do anything unexpected, the bureaucrat gets a notification from all this automation, along with your online and offline history."
No, it doesn't. If we are very unlucky, and keep electing the wrong people, it may happen that way some time in the future. But it isn't being done NOW. In fact that was part (though maybe a minor part) of OP's point.
There is a lot of resistance to this kind of shit, as well there should be. It may never happen.
"If it's such a big deal in order to get the same software to run on both systems then how does the Debian project manage to bring 37 000 packages to all eight architectures that it's currently running on? Magic?"
It *IS* a big deal. But it is also misguided.
Apple has had an unfortunate tendency to do this backward. Rather than making apps work BOTH on iOS and OS X, instead they made OS X work more like iOS. And that's a mistake.
As Microsoft has been learning, desktops are not tablets. Apps with interfaced designed for tablets are frustrating and difficult to use in a desktop environment.
What they should be working on is a way to make the apps work BOTH with a tablet-optimized interface, AND a desktop-optimized interface. OS X and iOS don't need to be the same things, though a common core wouldn't hurt a bit. But they should be making the APPS cross-platform, rather than trying to meld the OSes.
"Are you nuts? Tell that to the over 30,000,000 people in the US alone with HPV. Yeah they say they have a vaccine now for it, but that's for younger kids who haven't had much, if any sex. "
First, I wrote NEARLY. I didn't write "all".
Second: [A] HPV often goes away by itself. [B] While it isn't curable (yet) it *IS* treatable. And [C] as you mentioned, vaccines are available so it will only be less of a problem in the future. That isn't an argument against my point, it is an argument for it.
It's getting better. A cure for herpes is probably right around the corner (shingles "vaccine" being an example of a treatment for people who are already infected with a different but just as nasty form of herpes). And there are treatments for people who are currently infected (encyclovir, for example).
And even AIDS is falling to medical technology. A number of people have been CURED.
So yes, it's getting better. Far better than ever before.
"I really, really, really wish I could believe this. Yes, it's true, and yes, this is how it should work - but c'mon, it's ma bell jr. and her alumni, err, regulators. The question is, how will the payments be amortized over the coming quarters?"
Regardless of who they are, the regulators WANT Network Neutrality. They aren't cooperating with Verizon, they are on the other side.
I doubt it very much. The judges would have to be idiots.
I suppose that is not impossible. But truly, they'd have to be idiots to rule in Verizon's favor in this case. It is clearly not in the public interest, and the FCC does, in fact, have regulatory authority.
"That's like painting a big red X on your vehicle when you go to do something naughty, because you and your vehicle is also tracked other ways, such as your cell phone location, tracking of your license plate. Correlating records will make them want to know why you decided to drive downtown without your transponder."
It would probably never happen.
Bureaucrats learn to rely on their tools. If the vehicle shows up at certain checkpoints, it would probably never occur to them to spend the hundreds of man-hours necessary to check things like traffic cameras to see if they could find it running without the tracker.
"This would be funny if weren't so likely to be taken seriously by the regulatory agencies which SHOULD currently be waterboarding Verizon's CEO for even suggesting this. With boiling hot oil."
It ISN'T being taken seriously by the regulatory authorities. That's why there is a lawsuit. The regulatory authorities (FCC) realize full well that this would not be in the public interest, even if it were workable.
Verizon is trying to fight their regulatory authority in court. That's what it's all about. Verizon doesn't have a snowball's chance in Hell of succeeding, but they are trying anyway.
" The big problem is the government wants a way to see your data, unconditionally, whether or not you have ever done anything wrong, preferably without you knowing."
How does this make me "wrong", since we agree 100% that is the fundamental, underlying problem?
My point was only that Clipper was not an example of "backdoor" crypto. But it WAS definitely an example that government cannot be trusted.
"The Clipper episode doesn't give you insight into technique, in this case. It gives you insight into intent."
Slashdot Mirror
"Is Talk Origins "skeptical" using your criteria?"
I have never seen the site before, so I don't know, I don't care, and it is irrelevant to anything *I* have written here.
Correction: I don't know of anyone who argues that changing the forcing would not change the heat content. Again, the only question I have is whether such change is taking place.
Wait... I will amend that. I question whether the forcing is being changed in a way that is consistent with "greenhouse gas" warming models.
But the question is whether such a change in forcing is taking place; not whether such a forcing (IF you assume it exists) would change heat content.
"Its truth is due to conservation of mass-energy, which is also why changing the top of the atmosphere radiative forcing changes the climate's total heat content."
And further, since you want to re-raise an old issue: another fact is that nobody is arguing with you about that. But the fact that you seem to think someone is, calls into question your intelligence.
I do not know anybody who argues that changing radiative forcing can change the heat content. The only question *I* have is whether the forcing is actually being significantly changed.
So, I say again: knock off the bullshit, and stop arguing with me about things I'm not even arguing. All you're doing is proving, yet again, that you're a clueless asshole.
"Another preemptive accusation of dishonesty. Okay, I honestly admit that you very frequently quote inaccurate misinformation."
Nonsense. If you want to talk about "another", this is another distortion of what I actually wrote. I accused nobody of anything.
Fact, not opinion or accusation: the idea that muscle is 3 x as dense as fat is commonly quoted. If you are honest (and not mentally disabled), you WILL admit that.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080715161832AASDWuj
http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=35908
http://forum.t-tapp.com/showthread.php?16220-YOU-BET-MUSCLE-WEIGHS-MORE-THAN-FAT!
(I could find hundreds more if I wanted to.) So I wasn't accusing anyone of dishonesty. If anything, I was accusing them of NOT being mentally disabled. I'm wondering a bit about you, though.
"But none of this makes the analogy that "calories in > calories spent = weight gain" false as long as you're in a constant gravitational field."
Which is completely irrelevant to MY comment, which was about consuming more calories but losing inches.
The only accusation I'm making is that you're being an ass and deliberately picking on me, again. Go away. Your comments continue to add nothing to the actual discussion and I don't particularly like being harassed.
"People who reach a conclusion other than yours are dishonest? Is that accusation helpful?"
No, you distorted my words. Or at least my clear meaning.
I did not write "if they don't feel as I do they are dishonest." What I wrote was that if THEY are honest, they will reach the obvious conclusion. The difference may be small, but it exists and it is important.
Very obviously I was stating an opinion, but it is an honest one. The site carries nothing but articles about global warming, and SUPPORTS only one side of that argument. On the whole site. So, "skeptical" it ain't.
"Back then, a patent had one or two pages and described a (mostly mechanical) issue in simple language. Lawyers today make sure that a patent is minimum 50 pages, and some run to more than 1000. The language is extremely formalized and very hard to read for untrained minds. And the issues are so specialized that the average judge would have to train several years in the particular field to understand what the invention is about."
Maybe, but -- though I hate to put it this way -- it's really not that simple. Complexity has little to do with the subject under discussion.
The one-click patent, for example, should never have been awarded because it did nothing new.
Not only must a patent be non-obvious to someone in the relevant field, and not only must there not be "prior art" (someone else already doing something too similar) it must also be an actual invention. That is to say, it has to be or do something completely new. The point made by the court in OP's post is that it was not an invention because it was just two common things, stuck together.
A can opener welded to a crowbar is not patentable, because it doesn't do anything new or in a novel way. It's still just a can opener on one end, and a crowbar on the other. But if you stuck two common things together in such a way that the result does something new, then you have a patentable invention.
If you found a way to make a fan that blows air out of potato chips, in principle that would not be patentable, because you just "stuck together" two existing things; fans and potato chips. It doesn't do anything novel. But if you could build a fan out of potato chips in such a way that it was still edible, you would have a patentable invention because it does something new.
"If you want people to believe you, you really shouldn't use numbers that can be debunked by measurements that can be done fairly easily "
Very well, granted. Mea culpa.
However, if you're honest you also have to admit that while it's inaccurate, it's also a very frequently quoted figure.
And if you're honest, you also have to admit that it's still MORE dense, so the basic premise is still true: you CAN lose inches while gaining weight.
It isn't recursive.
The whole site is evidence that it is biased. Literally. If you look at it in its entirety, and you are objective, you could not honestly reach any other conclusion.
Just the fact that it is called "Skeptical Science", and yet the ONLY topic of discussion anywhere on the site is global warming (or the inappropriately-named "climate change", if you prefer), is pretty good evidence that its title was intended to mislead.
Um... in case you hadn't noticed, it has actually been the Republicans who have been trying to marginalize the idea of CO2 - based warming, not the Democrats.
"The problem with that analogy is that is seems people forget about the fact that a human can start exercising, therefor burning more calories that previously, and lose weight while taking in an even larger amount of calories."
It's actually false in another way. When you begin to get into decent shape, you lose inches but actually GAIN weight, because muscle is 3 x as dense as fat.
"If it's human, it's biased."
There is "human error" - type bias, and then there is deliberate bias.
"Citation?"
The whole damned site.
s/monitor/moniker
Damn You, Autocorrect!
"Also, the inconvenient truth was largely accurate: http://www.skepticalscience.com/al-gore-inconvenient-truth-errors.htm"
Skeptical Science is hardly an unbiased source. Lots of other sources have some rather scathing things to say about "Inconvenient Truth".
Skeptical Science is a propaganda machine. They adopted the "skeptical" monitor in order to try to infiltrate the actual skeptics.
Just sayin'... I'm not claiming they're wrong but like any other obviously biased source, any true skeptic is obligated to take their word with a large grain of salt.
"Uh... why would the FBI care about being caught?"
Because they illegally interrupted service of hundreds if not thousands of other customers of the hosting service.
See 18 USC 242, "Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law"
When there is danger of infringing on the rights (which includes contracts) of innocent parties, law enforcement is, at the very least, required to use "narrowly tailored" means to effect their business.
They used pretty much the opposite of "narrowly tailored" means. They just took over the whole hosting company and surveilled ALL the users.
Definitely a no-no. Definitely illegal.
No reasonable person is in favor of child pornography. But law enforcement is not allowed to break the law in order to enforce the law.
"Nonsense. 2.99GJ is simply 1.21GW over 2.47 seconds."
But it's all irrelevant, because OP's main premise is obviously false.
If we want to take the situation even a little bit literally, then a phaser could not be "vaporizing" its target. If it did, there would be a tremendous explosion. In fact, 2.99 GJ worth of "boom".
But we don't see that. Therefore a phaser could not be a "vaporizer" at all. Nor could it be a "molecular dissociation" device because the result could be the same.
I would have to theorize that it was some kind of device to send matter into another dimension, or some such. The energy required for that is completely unknown. It could be only a mJ or two. Who knows?
"What happens is that you do anything unexpected, the bureaucrat gets a notification from all this automation, along with your online and offline history."
No, it doesn't. If we are very unlucky, and keep electing the wrong people, it may happen that way some time in the future. But it isn't being done NOW. In fact that was part (though maybe a minor part) of OP's point.
There is a lot of resistance to this kind of shit, as well there should be. It may never happen.
"If it's such a big deal in order to get the same software to run on both systems then how does the Debian project manage to bring 37 000 packages to all eight architectures that it's currently running on? Magic?"
It *IS* a big deal. But it is also misguided.
Apple has had an unfortunate tendency to do this backward. Rather than making apps work BOTH on iOS and OS X, instead they made OS X work more like iOS. And that's a mistake.
As Microsoft has been learning, desktops are not tablets. Apps with interfaced designed for tablets are frustrating and difficult to use in a desktop environment.
What they should be working on is a way to make the apps work BOTH with a tablet-optimized interface, AND a desktop-optimized interface. OS X and iOS don't need to be the same things, though a common core wouldn't hurt a bit. But they should be making the APPS cross-platform, rather than trying to meld the OSes.
"Are you nuts? Tell that to the over 30,000,000 people in the US alone with HPV. Yeah they say they have a vaccine now for it, but that's for younger kids who haven't had much, if any sex. "
First, I wrote NEARLY. I didn't write "all".
Second: [A] HPV often goes away by itself. [B] While it isn't curable (yet) it *IS* treatable. And [C] as you mentioned, vaccines are available so it will only be less of a problem in the future. That isn't an argument against my point, it is an argument for it.
It's getting better. A cure for herpes is probably right around the corner (shingles "vaccine" being an example of a treatment for people who are already infected with a different but just as nasty form of herpes). And there are treatments for people who are currently infected (encyclovir, for example).
And even AIDS is falling to medical technology. A number of people have been CURED.
So yes, it's getting better. Far better than ever before.
"Tell that to the person taking meds to keep his herpes from flaring up."
You DO know what NEARLY means, right?
"I really, really, really wish I could believe this. Yes, it's true, and yes, this is how it should work - but c'mon, it's ma bell jr. and her alumni, err, regulators. The question is, how will the payments be amortized over the coming quarters?"
Regardless of who they are, the regulators WANT Network Neutrality. They aren't cooperating with Verizon, they are on the other side.
I doubt it very much. The judges would have to be idiots.
I suppose that is not impossible. But truly, they'd have to be idiots to rule in Verizon's favor in this case. It is clearly not in the public interest, and the FCC does, in fact, have regulatory authority.
"That's like painting a big red X on your vehicle when you go to do something naughty, because you and your vehicle is also tracked other ways, such as your cell phone location, tracking of your license plate. Correlating records will make them want to know why you decided to drive downtown without your transponder."
It would probably never happen.
Bureaucrats learn to rely on their tools. If the vehicle shows up at certain checkpoints, it would probably never occur to them to spend the hundreds of man-hours necessary to check things like traffic cameras to see if they could find it running without the tracker.
Possible, but unlikely.
"There's other STDs too, yanno. Might want still to whip a rubber on your cock."
Nearly all of them easily curable.
The people who said "The sexual revolution is over; the microbes won" were wrong. They didn't have modern medical technology.
"This would be funny if weren't so likely to be taken seriously by the regulatory agencies which SHOULD currently be waterboarding Verizon's CEO for even suggesting this. With boiling hot oil."
It ISN'T being taken seriously by the regulatory authorities. That's why there is a lawsuit. The regulatory authorities (FCC) realize full well that this would not be in the public interest, even if it were workable.
Verizon is trying to fight their regulatory authority in court. That's what it's all about. Verizon doesn't have a snowball's chance in Hell of succeeding, but they are trying anyway.
" The big problem is the government wants a way to see your data, unconditionally, whether or not you have ever done anything wrong, preferably without you knowing."
How does this make me "wrong", since we agree 100% that is the fundamental, underlying problem?
My point was only that Clipper was not an example of "backdoor" crypto. But it WAS definitely an example that government cannot be trusted.
"The Clipper episode doesn't give you insight into technique, in this case. It gives you insight into intent."
We are in complete agreement.