These points have been refuted so many times that it honestly isn't worth listing them again.
I sure as hell hope that no scientist has to work under these ludicrous standards you demand of the climatology field. They've demonstrated on several occasions that they have nothing to hide, and denialists just keep piling on them with more cherry-picked quotes. It's sickening to watch.
So where are the reviews that actually challenge the hypothesis - or is that untouchable?
Reviews don't do that; competing hypotheses do. In the world of science, a competing hypothesis overtakes the consensus if and only if it explains everything the old system could and more that it couldn't. Science demands alternative explanations that solve inconsistencies; finding a problem with the consensus is only the first step, and denialists are stuck there.
If I were to pay $90 a month for that, I would consider it a ripoff because I could neither resell nor refund my purchase. DVDs are slightly less of a rip-off in that regard. Oh, I'm paying for a service? I pay my ISP enough as it is; I don't need another money sink.
That's what happens when I hit Reply too fast... The first season is available on DVD, but as you alluded to, it's not available worldwide. The second season isn't available at all; there are still people out there with no legitimate way to watch the show, and that is where BitTorrent shines.
I'll remember that the next time somebody says to "vote with your dollars".
Newsflash: Content providers do whatever the hell they want. The only way to push back is to repeal the obscene legislation that brands copyright infringers as criminals.
I can't think of any online TV show viewers that buffer the video in any appreciable way. Downloading the show via BitTorrent is pretty much the only way to guarantee the show can be watched on a slow connection, or, in the case of HD video, viewed at all without constant underruns.
What if you could read much of your child's medical future while it was still in the womb?
The more worrying question here in the U.S. is, "What if your insurance company could decide your child's medical access while it was still in the womb, based on poorly-understood genetic risk factors and eugenics pseudoscience?"
Escape to where, exactly? Alarmist as they may be at times, environmentalists have a point: we all live here, and we haven't found anywhere else to populate. Evacuating the Earth is a fantasy even more remote from reality than the most extreme environmentalist solutions.
I suspect a lot of people in Brownsville are instead looking forward to the jobs, tourists and excitement that a spaceport would bring.
I don't see how that follows from environmental concerns. Majority (or, in this case, nearly universal) support for something doesn't necessarily mean it's good in the long term.
It's more pervasive than you would think. The foundation of discrimination and anti-intellectualism is social exclusion, and our culture encourages social exclusion as a punishment for nonconformity. Kids don't necessarily want to lock themselves away, otherwise lonely people wouldn't suffer from depression. Their peers deem them unfit to belong in the group, and they find a temporary fix with video games, porn, etc. It's a societal problem, and all of us have to do a bit of introspection to figure out how to change it.
Social exclusion is widely employed by American culture and is meant to be a punishment, but video games and porn, among other things, route around that. Authoritarians are now angry that the punishment no longer works.
The "legalities" meant little or nothing over the long term.
So true. I never fully understood the vitriol aimed at illegal immigrants for precisely this reason. Europeans illegally emigrated to the Americas. legality =/= morality Yes, European colonists treat the Americas like shit, but that should be debated within its own moral framework.
Well, if you want to be pedantic... Atmospheric refraction can make the disc of the Sun visible even when the Sun is below the horizon. Thus, if a solar eclipse were visible just above the horizon at sunset (as it will be in some parts of North America), it would technically be visible at night.
I'm sure the US military would disagree that it's technological secrets should belong to the public domain.
Well, guess what? It's funded by taxpayers, so unless there's a damn good reason not to (and no, the circular reason of it being "top-secret" is not a good reason), it should be public domain. NASA is not a military entity, so that reasoning doesn't even apply.
Yes, life is unfair, as your sig indicates. Read further than that to see my reasoning behind good and bad laws.
I'm sure deregulation has a lot to do with the government's own security practices when they have data leaks as well, right?
Actually, yes. Contracting IT to the lowest bidder is a big problem with government data security. It really doesn't help that those who discover security vulnerabilities are severely punished for it, though.
Even if it just so happened that a god "jump-started" creation and left the universe alone after that, it is a proposition that lies outside the realm of science. Asserting it was created and left alone leaves science with no more knowledge than asserting otherwise.
There is not a single shred of evidence to prove there is not a creator. Not one. So why do we teach evolution as the only answer?
It's impossible to prove the non-existence of god(s), pink unicorns, etc. The burden of proof lies with those asserting that God is real to, well, prove it. Evolution has evidence. Creationism does not. Therefore, creationism should not be entertained in a science classroom except as an illustrative example of pseudoscience.
50 years of NASA research being stolen, which has already happened.
Stolen? NASA is a public entity, and its advances should rightly be part of the public domain.
I'm sure there are many slashdotters out there who believe that tech secrets should be free, but I don't think so. When you put effort into a project, only to have somebody else rip off your idea and implement it with none of that cost, and therefore they can implement it cheaper than you can, making your entire effort go to waste, is really underhanded and in my opinion unfair.
Lots of things in life are unfair. The question is, will enforcement of a solution be more harmful to society than leaving things be? I can think of enough egregious abuses of the notion of "intellectual property" to err on the side of not giving up more of my freedoms.
And before somebody says getting your identity stolen is only the result of your own stupidity, think again.
Not many people think that. In the case of financial "identity theft", however, the banks try to cover their asses. It is often the shoddy security practices of banks (yay deregulation!) that allow massive overseas transfers to happen in the first place.
The military is very likely to stand up for the people in the case of a revolt.
As flaming error mentioned above, the excesses of law enforcement suggest otherwise, and those abuses pale in comparison to military abuse overseas. If I had to guess, an Arab settlement full of people doesn't look much different from a U.S. city full of people when you're staring at them from a helicopter gunship.
The military won't have a problem steamrolling us. A few "bad apples" may ignore orders, sure, but the military has protocol in place to deal with them.
Leadership perhaps, but even those leaders would be an extreme minority. The majority of the military is made up of people just like you and I.
The military also has a vested interest in making sure those of lower rank (the majority) obey their superiors, otherwise there really wouldn't be much of a point in having a military. History has shown that things get more authoritarian when a nation is overthrown by its military.
We really are at a point where the house needs to be cleaned completely. I think if it started to happen, we'd quickly have a police state. The Government has been gearing up for it at least. We can hope the Military prevents it from happening.
The military has a vested interest in operating in a police state. Given the chance, they would usurp it, not prevent it.
The only planets larger than Earth in the Solar system are the gas giants, so a super Earth is just a designation for a planet more massive than Earth, but not a gas giant.
The right hates science and it's conclusions, and the problem with these satellites is that they promote science and the conclusions scientists reach.
The right doesn't mind science R&D (i.e. the fraction of research that private companies can get an immediate ROI on.) It's just the pesky fundamental research with no foreseeable application and no quarterly profit that gets them upset; but without the fundamental research, there are no more breakthroughs.
Slashdot Mirror
These points have been refuted so many times that it honestly isn't worth listing them again.
I sure as hell hope that no scientist has to work under these ludicrous standards you demand of the climatology field. They've demonstrated on several occasions that they have nothing to hide, and denialists just keep piling on them with more cherry-picked quotes. It's sickening to watch.
So where are the reviews that actually challenge the hypothesis - or is that untouchable?
Reviews don't do that; competing hypotheses do. In the world of science, a competing hypothesis overtakes the consensus if and only if it explains everything the old system could and more that it couldn't. Science demands alternative explanations that solve inconsistencies; finding a problem with the consensus is only the first step, and denialists are stuck there.
If I were to pay $90 a month for that, I would consider it a ripoff because I could neither resell nor refund my purchase. DVDs are slightly less of a rip-off in that regard.
Oh, I'm paying for a service? I pay my ISP enough as it is; I don't need another money sink.
That's what happens when I hit Reply too fast...
The first season is available on DVD, but as you alluded to, it's not available worldwide. The second season isn't available at all; there are still people out there with no legitimate way to watch the show, and that is where BitTorrent shines.
You can watch the show on a connection as slow as dial-up if you go to Amazon and buy the complete first season on DVD.
Assuming it's even available on DVD, which Game of Thrones isn't. Besides, even on dial-up, it might download faster than the shipping time.
I'll remember that the next time somebody says to "vote with your dollars".
Newsflash: Content providers do whatever the hell they want. The only way to push back is to repeal the obscene legislation that brands copyright infringers as criminals.
I can't think of any online TV show viewers that buffer the video in any appreciable way. Downloading the show via BitTorrent is pretty much the only way to guarantee the show can be watched on a slow connection, or, in the case of HD video, viewed at all without constant underruns.
What if you could read much of your child's medical future while it was still in the womb?
The more worrying question here in the U.S. is, "What if your insurance company could decide your child's medical access while it was still in the womb, based on poorly-understood genetic risk factors and eugenics pseudoscience?"
Escape to where, exactly? Alarmist as they may be at times, environmentalists have a point: we all live here, and we haven't found anywhere else to populate. Evacuating the Earth is a fantasy even more remote from reality than the most extreme environmentalist solutions.
I suspect a lot of people in Brownsville are instead looking forward to the jobs, tourists and excitement that a spaceport would bring.
I don't see how that follows from environmental concerns. Majority (or, in this case, nearly universal) support for something doesn't necessarily mean it's good in the long term.
Are you a bad enough dude to innovate the President?
Come on... That's just a BS copout.
It's more pervasive than you would think. The foundation of discrimination and anti-intellectualism is social exclusion, and our culture encourages social exclusion as a punishment for nonconformity. Kids don't necessarily want to lock themselves away, otherwise lonely people wouldn't suffer from depression. Their peers deem them unfit to belong in the group, and they find a temporary fix with video games, porn, etc. It's a societal problem, and all of us have to do a bit of introspection to figure out how to change it.
Social exclusion is widely employed by American culture and is meant to be a punishment, but video games and porn, among other things, route around that. Authoritarians are now angry that the punishment no longer works.
The "legalities" meant little or nothing over the long term.
So true. I never fully understood the vitriol aimed at illegal immigrants for precisely this reason. Europeans illegally emigrated to the Americas. legality =/= morality
Yes, European colonists treat the Americas like shit, but that should be debated within its own moral framework.
Well, if you want to be pedantic...
Atmospheric refraction can make the disc of the Sun visible even when the Sun is below the horizon. Thus, if a solar eclipse were visible just above the horizon at sunset (as it will be in some parts of North America), it would technically be visible at night.
I'm sure the US military would disagree that it's technological secrets should belong to the public domain.
Well, guess what? It's funded by taxpayers, so unless there's a damn good reason not to (and no, the circular reason of it being "top-secret" is not a good reason), it should be public domain. NASA is not a military entity, so that reasoning doesn't even apply.
Yes, life is unfair, as your sig indicates. Read further than that to see my reasoning behind good and bad laws.
I'm sure deregulation has a lot to do with the government's own security practices when they have data leaks as well, right?
Actually, yes. Contracting IT to the lowest bidder is a big problem with government data security. It really doesn't help that those who discover security vulnerabilities are severely punished for it, though.
Even if it just so happened that a god "jump-started" creation and left the universe alone after that, it is a proposition that lies outside the realm of science. Asserting it was created and left alone leaves science with no more knowledge than asserting otherwise.
There is not a single shred of evidence to prove there is not a creator. Not one. So why do we teach evolution as the only answer?
It's impossible to prove the non-existence of god(s), pink unicorns, etc. The burden of proof lies with those asserting that God is real to, well, prove it.
Evolution has evidence. Creationism does not. Therefore, creationism should not be entertained in a science classroom except as an illustrative example of pseudoscience.
50 years of NASA research being stolen, which has already happened.
Stolen? NASA is a public entity, and its advances should rightly be part of the public domain.
I'm sure there are many slashdotters out there who believe that tech secrets should be free, but I don't think so. When you put effort into a project, only to have somebody else rip off your idea and implement it with none of that cost, and therefore they can implement it cheaper than you can, making your entire effort go to waste, is really underhanded and in my opinion unfair.
Lots of things in life are unfair. The question is, will enforcement of a solution be more harmful to society than leaving things be? I can think of enough egregious abuses of the notion of "intellectual property" to err on the side of not giving up more of my freedoms.
And before somebody says getting your identity stolen is only the result of your own stupidity, think again.
Not many people think that. In the case of financial "identity theft", however, the banks try to cover their asses. It is often the shoddy security practices of banks (yay deregulation!) that allow massive overseas transfers to happen in the first place.
The military is very likely to stand up for the people in the case of a revolt.
As flaming error mentioned above, the excesses of law enforcement suggest otherwise, and those abuses pale in comparison to military abuse overseas. If I had to guess, an Arab settlement full of people doesn't look much different from a U.S. city full of people when you're staring at them from a helicopter gunship.
The military won't have a problem steamrolling us. A few "bad apples" may ignore orders, sure, but the military has protocol in place to deal with them.
Leadership perhaps, but even those leaders would be an extreme minority. The majority of the military is made up of people just like you and I.
The military also has a vested interest in making sure those of lower rank (the majority) obey their superiors, otherwise there really wouldn't be much of a point in having a military. History has shown that things get more authoritarian when a nation is overthrown by its military.
We really are at a point where the house needs to be cleaned completely. I think if it started to happen, we'd quickly have a police state. The Government has been gearing up for it at least. We can hope the Military prevents it from happening.
The military has a vested interest in operating in a police state. Given the chance, they would usurp it, not prevent it.
The only planets larger than Earth in the Solar system are the gas giants, so a super Earth is just a designation for a planet more massive than Earth, but not a gas giant.
Truly spiritual christian types do not have a lot of time or room for hate.
You seem to have a lot of room for ad hominem, though. Nice troll.
The right hates science and it's conclusions, and the problem with these satellites is that they promote science and the conclusions scientists reach.
The right doesn't mind science R&D (i.e. the fraction of research that private companies can get an immediate ROI on.) It's just the pesky fundamental research with no foreseeable application and no quarterly profit that gets them upset; but without the fundamental research, there are no more breakthroughs.