"How do you determine when that actually makes the corporation evil versus, it just being fallible leaders entrusted with duties improperly directing people in the corporation to do things that are in effect evil? "
I'm not concerned about determining when, myself. My assertion was only that it was possible.
I believe the article was referring to the UK. I don't know what the laws are there, but here in the U.S., a company would be closed down quickly if it were found the meat had been adulterated like that.
Sure, there was the flap over "pink slime"... but that was still beef, though it was washed in ammonia. I don't think it was the meat people were bitching about so much as the ammonia.
It should be noted that only one company produced the ammonia-soaked "pink slime", and they don't do it anymore. Other companies process trimmings, too, but they already used other methods to keep the meat bacteria-free.)
Is an entire corporation automatically evil, if some person or group that works for it, does something evil, to improve their status in the organization? "
Maybe not, but who says that has to be the case? We know of actual cases where corporations -- with the full knowledge of their leaders -- sold arms to countries that were on the government's prohibited list; that drove other corporations out of business via nefarious (rather then market) means; and so on. And most people would call those things evil.
The fact that you can come up with situations in which they may not be evil, does not negate the real situations in which they clearly have been.
I was not trying to claim that corporations are going around selling children willy-nilly. My point was that it is certainly possible to profit in ways that are good or evil, whether you are an individual *or* a corporation.
And since a corporation's board and officers are the corporation in a real sense, I would say yes, it is quite possible for a corporation to be evil.
Even if it claims to be otherwise. Hear that, Google?
"I think it makes far more sense to have a FB account that you fill with partly real, mostly bogus information than not having one and getting marked out as a oddball, paranoid, delusional type."
I do. Just as with my Slashdot comments, I lay false trails. Enough that I usually know whether somebody is trying to mess with me, anyway. And yes, one or two people have fallen for it. Though they don't know it yet. I may just give them enough rope to hang themselves. We'll see.
I have a Facebook account. In fact I have several. I don't use them. They are only there for amusement.
For example: when they came out with that "real name only" policy, I opened a new account under the most ridiculous name I could think of at the time. Not only is it still there, it occasionally gets friend requests.
No doubt those are spam... I doubt anybody here at Slashdot who read the name would even consider "friending" that account. But it serves to illustrate the ridiculousness of the whole thing.
"Since you couldn't understand what I meant: The feds, the music industry, the movie industry, the porn industry, the gaming industry and the software industry to name a few."
Echo the other responses so far.
But also: it doesn't much matter until it actually starts working; it appears to have been Slashdotted. Sample upload is frozen; doesn't work in any browser tried so far.
Besides... if you are going to hold your convention (contest, whatever) in New York City, the only people you are going to get are those who don't need the money anyway. You aren't going to get starving young programmers (or many, anyway) to fly to New York and rent a room.
"TL;DR: the format already exists, it's called PDF."
No, it isn't.
PDF is a proprietary format that can change at any time at the behest of Adobe. (And in fact has changed on a pretty regular basis, with no requirement for "public" input.) So far, they have decided to be user-friendly about making the format available to the public, but there is NOTHING saying that will be true tomorrow.
A standard medical record format has to be PUBLIC, not proprietary. The Open Document standards (Open Office, Libre Office) come a hell of a lot closer to a truly public format than Adobe ever has.
And just as an aside: in my opinion, anybody who would use Microsoft or Google to store their medical records must be seriously uninformed or crazy. Might as well give them to Facebook.
"Corporations are not good or evil, they only want profit."
Hahaha. That's funny.
Saying that good and evil don't apply is just so much nonsense. There are both good and evil ways to make a profit. For example, I think most people would agree that charging market price for a commodity is generally good, while selling children as sex slaves is evil.
And there is a whole spectrum of things in between.
"Based on a range of models, it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense..."
According to a number of studies, total global cyclonic energy over the last few years has been among the lowest in 30 years.
And I would like to quote an excerpt from Mims' review (from the IPCC transcript), which I think is relevant and significant:
"ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF INCLUDING MENTION OF THE NVAP-M PAPER AND ITS FIG. 4C IN AR5: Positive feedback of water vapor (enhanced evaporation due to warming induced by GHGs) is key to GCMs. This key fact is why the new NVAP-M paper should be discussed and cited in AR5. While the original NVAP work was criticized, this should be considered in light of published problems with all the major global water studies (see, for example, Trenberth, K. E.; Fusillo, J; Smith, L. Trends and variability in column-integrated water vapor. Climate Dynamics 2005, 24 (7-8), 741â"758). The 2012 NVAP-M study is a significant improvement and expansion over the original study. It is also the most comprehensive, multi- sourced atmospheric water vapor study to date, for NVAP-M uses data from quality-controlled upper air radiosonde soundings; SSM/I, HIRS, AIRS satellite soundings; and GPS stations. Note that HIRS retrieves the vertical profile of water vapor over land. A timeline of instruments used for the 2012 NVAP-M paper is at ftp://ftp.agu.org/apend/gl/2012GL052094. In conclusion, the initial 2012 NVAP-M paper well deserves discussion and citation in AR5. The citation is: Thomas H. Vonder Haar, Janice L. Bytheway and John M. Forsythe. Weather and climate analyses using improved global water vapor observations. GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 39, L15802, 6 PP., 2012. doi:10.1029/2012GL052094. Disclaimer: I do not know and have never met any of the NVAP team. I received one brief e-mail from a member of the team in response to a question about when the 2012 paper would be published."
This paper was published in early 2012, while some of the other papers cited in AR5 have not even been published yet. So any claim that they have not had time to evaluate it is not very credible.
"The Briffa/Melvin/Grudd paper is specific to the TornetrÃsk region of northern Sweden."
You make a good point. I was reading the part of the paper about using Regional Curve Standardization and mistakenly thought they were adjusting to match larger data sets. But it says right there that they are not.
"The fact that Forrest Mims is an AR5 reviewer doesn't impress me. After all Lord Monckton was able to sign on as a reviewer. If we had wanted to you and I could have probably signed on too."
If it doesn't impress you, then it should not impress you that Michael Mann was a reviewer, either. At least Mims is not trying to claim, as Mann has, that he won a Nobel prize for his reviewing.
But really, you made an old point for me: just about anybody can be a reviewer. And often has been. Thank you for acknowledging that. It puts the old "2500 scientists" claim (which is still often repeated) in better -- more realistic -- perspective.
"In other words they're saying they haven't completed their work and done enough analysis yet to say anything about global water vapor trends. It would be premature to cite it in the AR5 since at this point it does nothing to confirm or refute other water vapor datasets. Here is the NVAP Statement on Using Existing NVAP Dataset (1988-2001) for Trends."
I read the statement, and also the IPCC's publication of Mims' review. I was unaware that the old data analysis was considered inadequate, which does change the context a little. Nevertheless, the new paper (which, strangely, cannot be accessed right now on the Geophysical Union's website) is by the same authors as that 2-year-old statement, and in fact constitutes the very re-analysis that the statement mentions was upcoming.
Given that there was plenty of warning that this re-analysis was coming, and that this is a 10+ year body of work, and consists of just exactly the kind of data that the IPCC is supposed to be seeking, I have to agree with Mims that the IPCC has been remiss in not waiting for it, and not even mentioning it. Especially considering the study's likely impact.
"We'll see what the AR5 says about it but recent Atlantic hurricane seasons have mostly been more active than average."
As I mentioned, we already know what they will say about it, if the current draft report is any reflection of the final report. It is possible that it is not, but I think that is unlikely. And Atlantic hurricane activity over the past year or so has been accompanied by lower activity elsewhere, so it is not representative of a global phenomenon. The fact that storms happened to hit a few populated regions this year does not make them "worse", in a climate context, than storms that did not. Also, as AGW enthusiasts are fond of saying: the occurrences of one or a few years is not "climate".
"Thanks, I had fun tracking down the stuff on NVAP and learned something."
Thanks in return for your input. I looked into it more thoroughly and learned a few things as well. I'd sure like to see the original paper, though. I'll try to remember to check the AGU website for it again later.
"A law, duly enacted, which makes it a felony to violate such ToS, makes criminal procedure apply. That law has to be fixed..."
The thing is: Congress probably never intended it to apply to a mere violation of TOS. The ultimate problem is that it is vague, and some prosecutors have chosen to interpret it that way.
The central issue is not "How can we prosecutors interpret this law to put more people in jail for worse 'crimes'?" There are actually two other questions here: "What was the intent of Congress?" and "Does that represent justice?"
"The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it." -- James Wilson, Founding Father.
"It doesn't depend on anything like that. If you broke a law in your land that is the law that applies. It doesn't matter if the TOS includes reference to a law. The TOS cannot change a law and should have no legal authority."
But that is exactly the issue here. Because the law as enacted was rather vague, some prosecutors have been claiming that violation of TOS means violation of the CFAA law... regardless of the fact that a TOS can vary widely from company to company or site to site.
If so, that would mean, in effect, that a company (or just website) could write its own law by just putting it in the TOS... which is absolutely contrary to our customary legal principles and concept of justice here in the U.S.
"Don't count on it. My understanding is that it won't be that much different than the previous one and many of the differences will show worse effects than before."
Probably not, if they base it on the scientific papers that have already been chosen for the report. Examples:
Recent paper from Ken Briffa and T. Melvin of University of East Anglia shows a Medieval Warm Period again... and no hockey stick. (Remember that UAE and CRU were the same folks Michael Mann was working with.)
(Also the WUWT site... but he's an actual IPCC reviewer. I would ask people to read his words, and not argue about irrelevancies like where they were published.)
And so on. There are also statements in the draft AR5 report that hurricanes and other such storms (annual cyclonic activity) is NOT expected to go up significantly as a result of global warming. That is a significant departure from IPCC's earlier claims.
This isn't definitive, of course, but this and other information strongly hint that the AR5 report -- if it reports the science accurately, which remains to be seen -- will be greatly toned down from what we have seen from them before.
I would tend to agree with you about the lithium batteries but I am skeptical about NiMH.
Certainly, many environmental "solutions" carry problems of their own. I don't dispute that.
But NiMH batteries are not the same as NiCd; they don't generally contain toxic substances as the lithium ion and cadmium-based batteries do, and they are largely recyclable.
"And more to the specific technical point, there's no easy, supported migration path from 5.x to 6.x.. The Centos Wiki howto page states with discouraging repetetiveness "A fresh install is generally strongly preferred over an upgrade. "
So in other words, we're talking here about major versions (5.x and 6.x), while minor versions (the.x) are still being upgraded for 5, so you don't have to start over with 6.
Slashdot Mirror
"How do you determine when that actually makes the corporation evil versus, it just being fallible leaders entrusted with duties improperly directing people in the corporation to do things that are in effect evil? "
I'm not concerned about determining when, myself. My assertion was only that it was possible.
"And you all do this from separate internet connections and different browsers?"
I'm not trying to fool Facebook. Or not much, anyway. It's other Facebook USERS I'm having fun with.
I believe the article was referring to the UK. I don't know what the laws are there, but here in the U.S., a company would be closed down quickly if it were found the meat had been adulterated like that.
Sure, there was the flap over "pink slime"... but that was still beef, though it was washed in ammonia. I don't think it was the meat people were bitching about so much as the ammonia.
It should be noted that only one company produced the ammonia-soaked "pink slime", and they don't do it anymore. Other companies process trimmings, too, but they already used other methods to keep the meat bacteria-free.)
"If it were 100% beef it would be a steak."
"Steak" is the way the meat is cut, not what kind of meat it is. There is pork steak, salmon steak, etc.
" Does this make the corporation evil?
Is an entire corporation automatically evil, if some person or group that works for it, does something evil, to improve their status in the organization? "
Maybe not, but who says that has to be the case? We know of actual cases where corporations -- with the full knowledge of their leaders -- sold arms to countries that were on the government's prohibited list; that drove other corporations out of business via nefarious (rather then market) means; and so on. And most people would call those things evil.
The fact that you can come up with situations in which they may not be evil, does not negate the real situations in which they clearly have been.
I was not trying to claim that corporations are going around selling children willy-nilly. My point was that it is certainly possible to profit in ways that are good or evil, whether you are an individual *or* a corporation.
And since a corporation's board and officers are the corporation in a real sense, I would say yes, it is quite possible for a corporation to be evil.
Even if it claims to be otherwise. Hear that, Google?
"Well I don't know about the former, but given they are all dead I'm pretty sure about the latter."
Not at all. They were superstrong and supersmart. Unfortunately for them, they were also supergullible.
"I think it makes far more sense to have a FB account that you fill with partly real, mostly bogus information than not having one and getting marked out as a oddball, paranoid, delusional type."
I do. Just as with my Slashdot comments, I lay false trails. Enough that I usually know whether somebody is trying to mess with me, anyway. And yes, one or two people have fallen for it. Though they don't know it yet. I may just give them enough rope to hang themselves. We'll see.
Mod up.
I have a Facebook account. In fact I have several. I don't use them. They are only there for amusement.
For example: when they came out with that "real name only" policy, I opened a new account under the most ridiculous name I could think of at the time. Not only is it still there, it occasionally gets friend requests.
No doubt those are spam... I doubt anybody here at Slashdot who read the name would even consider "friending" that account. But it serves to illustrate the ridiculousness of the whole thing.
"In order to make graph search more valuable, we helpfully disabled all your privacy settings."
Not so far from the truth. In the last "update", they set everybody's "allow search" setting to True.
Coincidence? I think not.
"Since you couldn't understand what I meant: The feds, the music industry, the movie industry, the porn industry, the gaming industry and the software industry to name a few."
Echo the other responses so far.
But also: it doesn't much matter until it actually starts working; it appears to have been Slashdotted. Sample upload is frozen; doesn't work in any browser tried so far.
Besides... if you are going to hold your convention (contest, whatever) in New York City, the only people you are going to get are those who don't need the money anyway. You aren't going to get starving young programmers (or many, anyway) to fly to New York and rent a room.
"... if you want their attention you are going to have to work for it."
I look at it the other way around: if they want MY attention, they can afford to pay for it.
"... your expected value is $13/hour."
It's a bit closer to 14, but that's still $14 per grueling, stressful hour.
I don't think $50k is worth the effort. Especially if you have to provide your own food, transportation, lodging, etc.
"TL;DR: the format already exists, it's called PDF."
No, it isn't.
PDF is a proprietary format that can change at any time at the behest of Adobe. (And in fact has changed on a pretty regular basis, with no requirement for "public" input.) So far, they have decided to be user-friendly about making the format available to the public, but there is NOTHING saying that will be true tomorrow.
A standard medical record format has to be PUBLIC, not proprietary. The Open Document standards (Open Office, Libre Office) come a hell of a lot closer to a truly public format than Adobe ever has.
And just as an aside: in my opinion, anybody who would use Microsoft or Google to store their medical records must be seriously uninformed or crazy. Might as well give them to Facebook.
"Corporations are not good or evil, they only want profit."
Hahaha. That's funny.
Saying that good and evil don't apply is just so much nonsense. There are both good and evil ways to make a profit. For example, I think most people would agree that charging market price for a commodity is generally good, while selling children as sex slaves is evil.
And there is a whole spectrum of things in between.
"Based on a range of models, it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense..."
According to a number of studies, total global cyclonic energy over the last few years has been among the lowest in 30 years.
And I would like to quote an excerpt from Mims' review (from the IPCC transcript), which I think is relevant and significant:
"ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF INCLUDING MENTION OF THE NVAP-M PAPER AND ITS FIG. 4C IN AR5: Positive feedback of water vapor (enhanced evaporation due to warming induced by GHGs) is key to GCMs. This key fact is why the new NVAP-M paper should be discussed and cited in AR5. While the original NVAP work was criticized, this should be considered in light of published problems with all the major global water studies (see, for example, Trenberth, K. E.; Fusillo, J; Smith, L. Trends and variability in column-integrated water vapor. Climate Dynamics 2005, 24 (7-8), 741â"758). The 2012 NVAP-M study is a significant improvement and expansion over the original study. It is also the most comprehensive, multi- sourced atmospheric water vapor study to date, for NVAP-M uses data from quality-controlled upper air radiosonde soundings; SSM/I, HIRS, AIRS satellite soundings; and GPS stations. Note that HIRS retrieves the vertical profile of water vapor over land. A timeline of instruments used for the 2012 NVAP-M paper is at ftp://ftp.agu.org/apend/gl/2012GL052094. In conclusion, the initial 2012 NVAP-M paper well deserves discussion and citation in AR5. The citation is: Thomas H. Vonder Haar, Janice L. Bytheway and John M. Forsythe. Weather and climate analyses using improved global water vapor observations. GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 39, L15802, 6 PP., 2012. doi:10.1029/2012GL052094. Disclaimer: I do not know and have never met any of the NVAP team. I received one brief e-mail from a member of the team in response to a question about when the 2012 paper would be published."
This paper was published in early 2012, while some of the other papers cited in AR5 have not even been published yet. So any claim that they have not had time to evaluate it is not very credible.
"The Briffa/Melvin/Grudd paper is specific to the TornetrÃsk region of northern Sweden."
You make a good point. I was reading the part of the paper about using Regional Curve Standardization and mistakenly thought they were adjusting to match larger data sets. But it says right there that they are not.
"The fact that Forrest Mims is an AR5 reviewer doesn't impress me. After all Lord Monckton was able to sign on as a reviewer. If we had wanted to you and I could have probably signed on too."
If it doesn't impress you, then it should not impress you that Michael Mann was a reviewer, either. At least Mims is not trying to claim, as Mann has, that he won a Nobel prize for his reviewing.
But really, you made an old point for me: just about anybody can be a reviewer. And often has been. Thank you for acknowledging that. It puts the old "2500 scientists" claim (which is still often repeated) in better -- more realistic -- perspective.
"In other words they're saying they haven't completed their work and done enough analysis yet to say anything about global water vapor trends. It would be premature to cite it in the AR5 since at this point it does nothing to confirm or refute other water vapor datasets. Here is the NVAP Statement on Using Existing NVAP Dataset (1988-2001) for Trends."
I read the statement, and also the IPCC's publication of Mims' review. I was unaware that the old data analysis was considered inadequate, which does change the context a little. Nevertheless, the new paper (which, strangely, cannot be accessed right now on the Geophysical Union's website) is by the same authors as that 2-year-old statement, and in fact constitutes the very re-analysis that the statement mentions was upcoming.
Given that there was plenty of warning that this re-analysis was coming, and that this is a 10+ year body of work, and consists of just exactly the kind of data that the IPCC is supposed to be seeking, I have to agree with Mims that the IPCC has been remiss in not waiting for it, and not even mentioning it. Especially considering the study's likely impact.
"We'll see what the AR5 says about it but recent Atlantic hurricane seasons have mostly been more active than average."
As I mentioned, we already know what they will say about it, if the current draft report is any reflection of the final report. It is possible that it is not, but I think that is unlikely. And Atlantic hurricane activity over the past year or so has been accompanied by lower activity elsewhere, so it is not representative of a global phenomenon. The fact that storms happened to hit a few populated regions this year does not make them "worse", in a climate context, than storms that did not. Also, as AGW enthusiasts are fond of saying: the occurrences of one or a few years is not "climate".
"Thanks, I had fun tracking down the stuff on NVAP and learned something."
Thanks in return for your input. I looked into it more thoroughly and learned a few things as well. I'd sure like to see the original paper, though. I'll try to remember to check the AGU website for it again later.
"Greed is extremely logical. It's self-gratification on a feedback loop."
It may be logical, but it is not logic. Two different things.
Greed is not logic.
"A law, duly enacted, which makes it a felony to violate such ToS, makes criminal procedure apply. That law has to be fixed..."
The thing is: Congress probably never intended it to apply to a mere violation of TOS. The ultimate problem is that it is vague, and some prosecutors have chosen to interpret it that way.
The central issue is not "How can we prosecutors interpret this law to put more people in jail for worse 'crimes'?" There are actually two other questions here: "What was the intent of Congress?" and "Does that represent justice?"
"The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it." -- James Wilson, Founding Father.
"Seems like a big case of "DUH" to me."
Tell it to the prosecutors, because some of them don't seem to understand that.
"It doesn't depend on anything like that. If you broke a law in your land that is the law that applies. It doesn't matter if the TOS includes reference to a law. The TOS cannot change a law and should have no legal authority."
But that is exactly the issue here. Because the law as enacted was rather vague, some prosecutors have been claiming that violation of TOS means violation of the CFAA law... regardless of the fact that a TOS can vary widely from company to company or site to site.
If so, that would mean, in effect, that a company (or just website) could write its own law by just putting it in the TOS... which is absolutely contrary to our customary legal principles and concept of justice here in the U.S.
THAT is why we want it changed, and clarified.
"Don't count on it. My understanding is that it won't be that much different than the previous one and many of the differences will show worse effects than before."
Probably not, if they base it on the scientific papers that have already been chosen for the report. Examples:
Recent paper from Ken Briffa and T. Melvin of University of East Anglia shows a Medieval Warm Period again... and no hockey stick. (Remember that UAE and CRU were the same folks Michael Mann was working with.)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/28/manns-hockey-stick-disappears-and-crus-briffa-helps-make-the-mwp-live-again-by-pointing-out-bias-in-ther-data/
(Yes, people can complain if they like that it's the WUWT site... but it's BRIFFA's paper!)
Another AR5 reviewer (Forrest M. Mims, a man I respect), speaks out about what he saw in the AR5 draft paper:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/14/another-ipcc-ar5-reviewer-speaks-out-no-trend-in-global-water-vapor/
(Also the WUWT site... but he's an actual IPCC reviewer. I would ask people to read his words, and not argue about irrelevancies like where they were published.)
And so on. There are also statements in the draft AR5 report that hurricanes and other such storms (annual cyclonic activity) is NOT expected to go up significantly as a result of global warming. That is a significant departure from IPCC's earlier claims.
This isn't definitive, of course, but this and other information strongly hint that the AR5 report -- if it reports the science accurately, which remains to be seen -- will be greatly toned down from what we have seen from them before.
I would tend to agree with you about the lithium batteries but I am skeptical about NiMH.
Certainly, many environmental "solutions" carry problems of their own. I don't dispute that.
But NiMH batteries are not the same as NiCd; they don't generally contain toxic substances as the lithium ion and cadmium-based batteries do, and they are largely recyclable.
"And more to the specific technical point, there's no easy, supported migration path from 5.x to 6.x.. The Centos Wiki howto page states with discouraging repetetiveness "A fresh install is generally strongly preferred over an upgrade. "
So in other words, we're talking here about major versions (5.x and 6.x), while minor versions (the .x) are still being upgraded for 5, so you don't have to start over with 6.