Actually there are electronic payment systems that can preserve privacy, if I remember correctly Applied Cryptography explains the whole thing quite well: the basic idea is to have digital certificates which are signed with blind signatures. You could even print them out and use them like cash notes. The real issue is that an electronic payment system with no tracking is not wanted by the government, and is probably illegal in most Western nations, which have implemented strict Know Your Customer and Anti Money Laundering regulations.
In practice, digital value transfer systems that have worked outside the legal frameworks of the West, like egold, became havens of crime and HYIP scams. The operators of egold were alledgedly well aware of the nature of their customers trade - their database supposedly had a notes field with insights like "known child pornographer" "drug dealer" etc. (egold was not anonymous to the server operators, so they had some degree of insight into what was going on). Larger scale "anonymous" systems (off shore banks etc.) are drivers of large scale tax evasion. It is no coincidence that many offshore Swiss accounts were closed when Switzerland announced that it would be collecting taxes on foreign accounts - even though it was to be done in a privacy preserving way, with no personal data being sent to the account holder's national government.
So, the issue is a bit complex. It is hard to justify large scale adoption of similar systems without some idea of the effect it would have on society and the economy. Whilst I like the idea of a non-government controlled currency, the prospect of people switching to a non-regulated currency also has significant downsides for the long-term. Large scale tax evasion would inevitably lead to calls for more government control; not only is it perceived as unfair, but an inability to raise taxes can have significant negative effects on an economy. A lack of accountability would inevitably lead to more Ponzi scams and tracking the proceeds of organised crime would be impossible, which would be a big problem for law enforcement.
Except it isn't that simple. You can't just assume that education improves if you replace a teacher, because there may be other factors that affect performance. You need to show - scientifically and statistically - that education does improve when teachers are replaced under this system. For a counter-example, consider another factor that might affect performance: classroom environment. It may be the case that the physical or social environment within a classroom is so bad that it is the dominant factor (I'm not saying this is the case, just saying that it is a possibility). So you fire one teacher and replace them, and the new teacher performs just as badly as the old one. So you fire that one, repeat, and so on. The problem is that you have assumed the teacher is the dominant factor that determines improvement. You can't just make an assumption like that, it's completely unscientific. You need to actually show that this is the case, and that requires a rigorous study on your firing/replacing system carried out over time.
The study only provides a potential metric for evaluating teacher performance. You still need to do the full experiment, to answer the hypothesis that "we can improve teaching by using this metric and firing teachers who perform poorly by it":
Split teachers into two groups. Use the metric to choose teachers to fire in one group. In the other, fire random teachers to establish a baseline.
Observe how the metric changes when the teacher is replaced.
Compare both groups. Does firing and replacing teachers according to this metric beat randomly firing teachers?
I think the job performance of any public employee should be public information
Why not make the job performance of every private employee public information? Or, at the least, accessible to shareholders - which for publically traded companies is basically the same thing.
I suspect many people here would not like their performance being evaluated by a metric and published for everyone to see. Lines Of Code, anyone? Of course, when it's your job in question, then there's always a reason why evaluating performance is more complex than a simple metric.
Firing all the teachers in a teacher won't do a damn thing if the kids come from homes in poor neighborhoods with inattentive parents.
Exactly. The next logical step is therefore to allow teachers to fire students. If teachers are liable for students performance, then they need to have the power to remove failing students. And if that isn't possible due to social reasons, then it is difficult to assign blame to the teacher for having a poor performing class.
Imagine being the boss of a company, where the employees are unpaid, and often not motivated or interested in the work that you want them to do. Add to that the fact that you can't select the employees, and you can't fire them, but you *personally* will be judged on their performance. Oh, and all the employees are teenagers and many just plain don't want to be there... Does that sound like an appealing prospect?
I like metrics, and I support the idea of improving teaching, but I don't trust that the government will implement either the correct metrics or the correct system to deal with the results of those metrics. For example, everyone is gungho about firing teachers, but the most effective solution may well be to spend more money and train the teachers better in the first place. More research is needed - for example, how come countries like Finland have the shortest hours per week spent on school teaching in the Western world, but also manage to get the best performing students? Do they have teacher metrics? Do they fire teachers who perform badly on those metrics? We should learn from the best in the world, instead of assuming that adopting some unproven system is going to magically make things better. Maybe firing poor metric teachers will put off people from joining the profession, and education as a whole will suffer? These things need to be considered before changing systems wholesale.
in the same school you can easily see which teachers are making a difference and which are not, even if overall the students are good or bad.
This assumes that all subjects are equal. The reality is that kids are more likely to show improvement on subjects that are easy (e.g. "watching movie" studies), than on subjects that are hard (math). That will result in a pressure on schools to drop hard subjects and adopt easy ones, which ultimately is bad for society (we need people who are good at the hard subjects).
That would mean that the leaker definitely didn't work for RealClimate and could still have been a UEA insider.
That hypothesis would still require the "leaker" to have hacked RealClimate which indicates some hacking skills (and incidentally would also be an illegal act). There is also the matter of the data uploads to a server at a university in Russia which the "leaker" also had access to. And, this is not the first time that a fictional "mole" has been blamed to obscure the true source, McIntyre has admitted previously lying about a "mole insider" at CRU:
On 24 July, McIntyre says he received a freedom of information (FOI) refusal from CRU. He announced it on his website. The next day McIntyre announced that he had got hold of a mass of data.
He was initially coy about it. He said: "Folks, guess what. I'm now in possession of a CRU version giving data for every station in their station list."
The next day he said: "I learned that the Met Office/CRU had identified the mole. They are now aware that there has in fact been a breach of security My guess is that they will not make the slightest effort to discipline the mole."
This was a tease. There was no human "mole", just a security breach. Rotter in San Francisco later blogged that "In late July I discovered they had left station data versions from 2003 and 1996 on their server without web page links but accessible all the same. They were stale versions of the requested data... just sitting in cyberspace waiting for someone to download."
So in conclusion, yes, it is possible that there was a rogue sysadmin at CRU who suddenly decided to release a huge dump of emails from a backup server, and who was also a hacker who could break in to RealClimate, and who had some link to Russia. But the alternative hypothesis - that they just got hacked from outside - seems more likely, particularly as they have had external facing security issues in the past.
I wonder what names you would call someone who denies there could ever be any link between an easily accessible way of killing people and the murder rate.
Fortunately, AFAIK, they didn't actually elect you as their spokesperson.
The majority of British people support gun control. If that fact makes you feel emotional and angry, that is your problem.
The ClimateGate emails were hacked not leaked. (unless you believe that the same leaker was working for both the RealClimate web site and the University of East Anglia...)
After Mosher received a posting from the hacker complaining that nothing was happening, he replied: "A lot is happening behind the scenes. It is not being ignored. Much is being coordinated among major players and the media. Thank you very much. You will notice the beginnings of activity on other sites now. Here soon to follow."
He doesn't sound too concerned that the data was obtained illegally. Bit different when the shoe is on the other foot eh?
1. The group is focused on a living leader to whom members seem to display excessively zealous, unquestioning commitment.
Anthony Watts, McIntyre et. al.
2. The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.
Read the latest web sites and books? Anti-AGW is taught as a FACT, pages and pages. Have to indoctrinate early ya know.
3. The group is preoccupied with making money.
Corporate Grants. Although I have to say that these guys are more narcissists that money grubbers.
4. Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.
Editors losing jobs, those expressing legitimate doubts ostracized, etc. Turned against temperature record skeptic Richard Muller the momen he announced that the temperature record was indeed accurate ("he was never a skeptic" - er yes he was, he was skeptical about the temperature record) It went from "Any result Muller comes out with will be top work" to "Muller is a fraud" overnight. Dissenting opinions must be removed
5. Mind-numbing techniques (such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, debilitating work routines) are used to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).
Nothing here.
6. The leadership dictates sometimes in great detail how members should think, act, and feel (for example: members must get permission from leaders to date, change jobs, get married; leaders may prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, how to discipline children, and so forth).
Dissenting opinions are quickly attacked and suppressed. Insist the "Mainstream Media" must support their point of view to be "fair and balanced".
7. The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s), and members (for example: the leader is considered the Messiah or an avatar; the group and/or the leader has a special mission to save humanity).
If you accept climate change then you a liberal socialist Gore loving sheeple idiot. We know better.
8. The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which causes conflict with the wider society.
Juden, Alarmist, Warmist, Liberal, Elitist, Genocide supporter, Hoaxer etc. What will I have to sew onto my shirt?
9. The group's leader is not accountable to any authorities (as are, for example, military commanders and ministers, priests, monks, and rabbis of mainstream denominations).
Hiding data, ignoring legal requests for data, computer hacking etc. No Problem as long as you are on the "Right" side of the debate.
10. The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify means that members would have considered unethical before joining the group (for example: collecting money for bogus charities)
Character assassinations of scientists are fine with us.
11. The leadership induces guilt feelings in members in order to control them.
Call yourself a patriot? These warmists are going to destroy our nation, what are you going to do to stop them?! "The repair of the mental damage done by alarmism aimed at the young will no doubt be a long and tricky task" Why are you allowing children to be brainwashed by this alarmist scum?!
12. Members' subservience to the group causes them to cut ties with family and friends, and to give up personal goals and activities that were of interest before joining the group.
OK, pretty much applies to Surfacestations guys.
13. Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group.
See 12. Also ClimateAudit etc.
14. Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members.
I'm sure Watts and McIntyre hang out with non-believers all the time.
"Put another way, in ecological terms, it would be extremely prudent to write off $20tn-worth of those reserves. In economic terms, of course, it would be a disaster, first and foremost for shareholders and executives of companies like ExxonMobil (and people in places like Venezuela)."
I bet the law knows the difference between shotgun pellets and "a bullet".
No, I doubt there is any legal difference in this context. If you know otherwise, then you will be able to provide a citation? One that states it is legal to shoot unmanned flying objects with a shotgun because it's just "a collision between unmanned flying objects some of which happen to be shotgun pellets", but that it would be illegal to use a rifle or handgun in the same situation because that would involve use of a "bullet".
45% is the national average. In some areas it's 80% (That article points out that the national figures for Iceland, Finland and Slovakia are 70%-80%)
It's a good idea - if your population is educated, then they are likely to be more productive, higher earners, less likely to be reliant on benefits etc.
And yet the UK has a fraction of the murder rate of the U.S. despite having a more urbanised population. 125 murders in Metropolitan London last year - a densely populated urban region with population of around 13 million with 5000 people per square km. Compare that to U.S. cities! 620 murders in the entire UK for a population of 62 million people. The majority of British people think gun control is a great idea.
Actually, many Americans wouldn't agree with that, when it comes to criminals, insurgents, people who live in occupied countries, etc. If the military drops a 500lb bomb on your neighborhood because the guy next door is an insurgent, you have no right to life, you're just "collateral damage". Whether you agree with this or not is a moral call, I'm just pointing out that the "right to life" is not universally acknowledged.
A human has right to live... A pigeon does not have that right -- if one believes otherwise, one has to prevent pigeons from being killed by predators.
Incorrect, because you are talking about two different things. You have suddenly switched from talking about the "right to live" to the "right to be protected".
Are you kidding? You really think the law is not going to recognise the difference between a helicopter and a bullet? By your logic, anyone could shoot down any unmanned launch craft and it would be completely legal because it's just "a collision between two unmanned flying objects". Try going to a local park and shooting all the kids tennis balls etc. midflight and see how far that argument gets you.
Don't know why this is modded Troll - shooting across a public highway is a crime (the incident report states "once shot, the helicopter lost lift and crash landed on the roadway of U.S. 601.") Responsible gun owners should be against people carrying out criminal acts with their guns.
If my property and privacy is invaded after I deny permission
So if your neighbor's house overlooks your fence, then you think you have the right to shoot him? Hmmm. I think not. By your logic this guy would have been liable for violating the airspace of thousands of New York residents: Aerial Video Footage of New York Taken By RC Plane
In fact, the law appears to be quite permissive as to use of aircraft in "uncontrolled" space. From Wikipedia:
In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has the sole authority to control all airspace, exclusively determining the rules and requirements for its use. Typically, in the "Uncontrolled" category of airspace, any pilot can fly any aircraft as low as he/she wants, subject to the requirement of maintaining a 500-foot (150 m) distance from people and man-made structures except for purposes of takeoff and landing, and not causing any hazard. Therefore, it appears to trump any individually claimed air rights, near airports especially."
Good lord, try actually reading one of the articles sometime! They were fully involved and fully aware of the negotiations to sell the rights to the trademark to "IP Application Development Limited".
The article doesn't say that. The article says "Apple contends that it acquired the iPad name when it bought rights in various countries from a Proview affiliate in Taiwan in 2009 for 35,000 British pounds ($55,000). Proview won a ruling from a mainland Chinese court in December that it was not bound by that sale."
Which means very little under international law. There is no joint ownership of property. That's one of the points of using an international limited liability corporation in the first place..
Are you suggesting that wives don't have the ability to sell a family car?
Under some legal systems, no, they don't. If your legal system doesn't recognise joint ownership of property (which is the case for international corporate law) then one person obviously does not have the right to sell the property of another.
If your wife sells the family car, and you realize later the car's been sold, i think that's between you and your wife, not the buyer's fault.
But this is not a family car. This is a system where you and your wife live apart in two countries under different legal systems, and those legal systems don't recognise any concept of joint ownership, but do recognise that you each have an individual property right in that country. Transnational corporations do not have joint ownership of property.
It's more like: "If your brother registers a trademark in one country, and you register the same trademark in another, then your brother licenses his trademark, you have still not licensed yours."
Now, there may be an argument that transnational corporations should be liable and bound by actions of their subsidiaries or sister corps, but that would require some form of unified worldwide regulations, and that is not how the international corporate legal framework works at the moment.
Spoken like a person who doesn't understand the complex realities surrounding animal cruelty and animal care. There are plenty of respectable animal shelters that do put animals down. Here's why: some proportion of the animals that are brought in will never, ever be re-homed. For example, around 25% of the dogs brought in to dogs homes are from police seizures of illegal fighting dogs. These dogs have been raised to fight, and used in illegal dog fights. These animals are, and will always be, dangerous. It is just not usually possible to re-home them in a family environment. The larger animal centers get tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of animals in this kind of state every year. Their funding is limited, and they can't afford to house and feed and pay veterinary bills for every animal until it reaches the end of its natural life. At this point there is a difficult choice: a) let the animal starve (obviously cruel) b) kill the animal in a humane way (not nice, but less cruel). The shelters choose option b. It should be no surprise why, even some nation's Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals have spoken in favour of culling when faced with the alternative of having uncared for animals starve to death.
Until you posted this I'd never actually noticed that my account is also on the list. My crime appears to be making two comments (12) at the beginning of January calling out someone obviously posting from multiple accounts. I have a feeling this "list" is going to grow and grow...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually there are electronic payment systems that can preserve privacy, if I remember correctly Applied Cryptography explains the whole thing quite well: the basic idea is to have digital certificates which are signed with blind signatures. You could even print them out and use them like cash notes. The real issue is that an electronic payment system with no tracking is not wanted by the government, and is probably illegal in most Western nations, which have implemented strict Know Your Customer and Anti Money Laundering regulations.
In practice, digital value transfer systems that have worked outside the legal frameworks of the West, like egold, became havens of crime and HYIP scams. The operators of egold were alledgedly well aware of the nature of their customers trade - their database supposedly had a notes field with insights like "known child pornographer" "drug dealer" etc. (egold was not anonymous to the server operators, so they had some degree of insight into what was going on). Larger scale "anonymous" systems (off shore banks etc.) are drivers of large scale tax evasion. It is no coincidence that many offshore Swiss accounts were closed when Switzerland announced that it would be collecting taxes on foreign accounts - even though it was to be done in a privacy preserving way, with no personal data being sent to the account holder's national government.
So, the issue is a bit complex. It is hard to justify large scale adoption of similar systems without some idea of the effect it would have on society and the economy. Whilst I like the idea of a non-government controlled currency, the prospect of people switching to a non-regulated currency also has significant downsides for the long-term. Large scale tax evasion would inevitably lead to calls for more government control; not only is it perceived as unfair, but an inability to raise taxes can have significant negative effects on an economy. A lack of accountability would inevitably lead to more Ponzi scams and tracking the proceeds of organised crime would be impossible, which would be a big problem for law enforcement.
Education improves, plain and simple.
Except it isn't that simple. You can't just assume that education improves if you replace a teacher, because there may be other factors that affect performance. You need to show - scientifically and statistically - that education does improve when teachers are replaced under this system. For a counter-example, consider another factor that might affect performance: classroom environment. It may be the case that the physical or social environment within a classroom is so bad that it is the dominant factor (I'm not saying this is the case, just saying that it is a possibility). So you fire one teacher and replace them, and the new teacher performs just as badly as the old one. So you fire that one, repeat, and so on. The problem is that you have assumed the teacher is the dominant factor that determines improvement. You can't just make an assumption like that, it's completely unscientific. You need to actually show that this is the case, and that requires a rigorous study on your firing/replacing system carried out over time.
The study only provides a potential metric for evaluating teacher performance. You still need to do the full experiment, to answer the hypothesis that "we can improve teaching by using this metric and firing teachers who perform poorly by it":
Split teachers into two groups. Use the metric to choose teachers to fire in one group. In the other, fire random teachers to establish a baseline.
Observe how the metric changes when the teacher is replaced.
Compare both groups. Does firing and replacing teachers according to this metric beat randomly firing teachers?
I think the job performance of any public employee should be public information
Why not make the job performance of every private employee public information? Or, at the least, accessible to shareholders - which for publically traded companies is basically the same thing.
I suspect many people here would not like their performance being evaluated by a metric and published for everyone to see. Lines Of Code, anyone? Of course, when it's your job in question, then there's always a reason why evaluating performance is more complex than a simple metric.
Firing all the teachers in a teacher won't do a damn thing if the kids come from homes in poor neighborhoods with inattentive parents.
Exactly. The next logical step is therefore to allow teachers to fire students. If teachers are liable for students performance, then they need to have the power to remove failing students. And if that isn't possible due to social reasons, then it is difficult to assign blame to the teacher for having a poor performing class.
Imagine being the boss of a company, where the employees are unpaid, and often not motivated or interested in the work that you want them to do. Add to that the fact that you can't select the employees, and you can't fire them, but you *personally* will be judged on their performance. Oh, and all the employees are teenagers and many just plain don't want to be there... Does that sound like an appealing prospect?
I like metrics, and I support the idea of improving teaching, but I don't trust that the government will implement either the correct metrics or the correct system to deal with the results of those metrics. For example, everyone is gungho about firing teachers, but the most effective solution may well be to spend more money and train the teachers better in the first place. More research is needed - for example, how come countries like Finland have the shortest hours per week spent on school teaching in the Western world, but also manage to get the best performing students? Do they have teacher metrics? Do they fire teachers who perform badly on those metrics? We should learn from the best in the world, instead of assuming that adopting some unproven system is going to magically make things better. Maybe firing poor metric teachers will put off people from joining the profession, and education as a whole will suffer? These things need to be considered before changing systems wholesale.
What teachers make
in the same school you can easily see which teachers are making a difference and which are not, even if overall the students are good or bad.
This assumes that all subjects are equal. The reality is that kids are more likely to show improvement on subjects that are easy (e.g. "watching movie" studies), than on subjects that are hard (math). That will result in a pressure on schools to drop hard subjects and adopt easy ones, which ultimately is bad for society (we need people who are good at the hard subjects).
That would mean that the leaker definitely didn't work for RealClimate and could still have been a UEA insider.
That hypothesis would still require the "leaker" to have hacked RealClimate which indicates some hacking skills (and incidentally would also be an illegal act). There is also the matter of the data uploads to a server at a university in Russia which the "leaker" also had access to. And, this is not the first time that a fictional "mole" has been blamed to obscure the true source, McIntyre has admitted previously lying about a "mole insider" at CRU:
On 24 July, McIntyre says he received a freedom of information (FOI) refusal from CRU. He announced it on his website. The next day McIntyre announced that he had got hold of a mass of data.
He was initially coy about it. He said: "Folks, guess what. I'm now in possession of a CRU version giving data for every station in their station list."
The next day he said: "I learned that the Met Office/CRU had identified the mole. They are now aware that there has in fact been a breach of security My guess is that they will not make the slightest effort to discipline the mole."
This was a tease. There was no human "mole", just a security breach. Rotter in San Francisco later blogged that "In late July I discovered they had left station data versions from 2003 and 1996 on their server without web page links but accessible all the same. They were stale versions of the requested data ... just sitting in cyberspace waiting for someone to download."
McIntyre later admitted that "I downloaded from the public CRU ftp site ... No hacking was involved". Climate emails: were they really hacked or just sitting in cyberspace?
So in conclusion, yes, it is possible that there was a rogue sysadmin at CRU who suddenly decided to release a huge dump of emails from a backup server, and who was also a hacker who could break in to RealClimate, and who had some link to Russia. But the alternative hypothesis - that they just got hacked from outside - seems more likely, particularly as they have had external facing security issues in the past.
Fortunately, AFAIK, they didn't actually elect you as their spokesperson.
The majority of British people support gun control. If that fact makes you feel emotional and angry, that is your problem.
After Mosher received a posting from the hacker complaining that nothing was happening, he replied: "A lot is happening behind the scenes. It is not being ignored. Much is being coordinated among major players and the media. Thank you very much. You will notice the beginnings of activity on other sites now. Here soon to follow."
He doesn't sound too concerned that the data was obtained illegally. Bit different when the shoe is on the other foot eh?
1. The group is focused on a living leader to whom members seem to display excessively zealous, unquestioning commitment.
Anthony Watts, McIntyre et. al.
2. The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.
Read the latest web sites and books? Anti-AGW is taught as a FACT, pages and pages. Have to indoctrinate early ya know.
3. The group is preoccupied with making money.
Corporate Grants. Although I have to say that these guys are more narcissists that money grubbers.
4. Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.
Editors losing jobs, those expressing legitimate doubts ostracized, etc. Turned against temperature record skeptic Richard Muller the momen he announced that the temperature record was indeed accurate ("he was never a skeptic" - er yes he was, he was skeptical about the temperature record) It went from "Any result Muller comes out with will be top work" to "Muller is a fraud" overnight. Dissenting opinions must be removed
5. Mind-numbing techniques (such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, debilitating work routines) are used to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).
Nothing here.
6. The leadership dictates sometimes in great detail how members should think, act, and feel (for example: members must get permission from leaders to date, change jobs, get married; leaders may prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, how to discipline children, and so forth).
Dissenting opinions are quickly attacked and suppressed. Insist the "Mainstream Media" must support their point of view to be "fair and balanced".
7. The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s), and members (for example: the leader is considered the Messiah or an avatar; the group and/or the leader has a special mission to save humanity).
If you accept climate change then you a liberal socialist Gore loving sheeple idiot. We know better.
8. The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which causes conflict with the wider society.
Juden, Alarmist, Warmist, Liberal, Elitist, Genocide supporter, Hoaxer etc. What will I have to sew onto my shirt?
9. The group's leader is not accountable to any authorities (as are, for example, military commanders and ministers, priests, monks, and rabbis of mainstream denominations).
Hiding data, ignoring legal requests for data, computer hacking etc. No Problem as long as you are on the "Right" side of the debate.
10. The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify means that members would have considered unethical before joining the group (for example: collecting money for bogus charities)
Character assassinations of scientists are fine with us.
11. The leadership induces guilt feelings in members in order to control them.
Call yourself a patriot? These warmists are going to destroy our nation, what are you going to do to stop them?! "The repair of the mental damage done by alarmism aimed at the young will no doubt be a long and tricky task" Why are you allowing children to be brainwashed by this alarmist scum?!
12. Members' subservience to the group causes them to cut ties with family and friends, and to give up personal goals and activities that were of interest before joining the group.
OK, pretty much applies to Surfacestations guys.
13. Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group.
See 12. Also ClimateAudit etc.
14. Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members.
I'm sure Watts and McIntyre hang out with non-believers all the time.
Here's an interesting recent article along the lines of your comment: Why the energy industry is so invested in climate change denial
"Put another way, in ecological terms, it would be extremely prudent to write off $20tn-worth of those reserves. In economic terms, of course, it would be a disaster, first and foremost for shareholders and executives of companies like ExxonMobil (and people in places like Venezuela)."
What would you not do for $20 trillion?
I bet the law knows the difference between shotgun pellets and "a bullet".
No, I doubt there is any legal difference in this context. If you know otherwise, then you will be able to provide a citation? One that states it is legal to shoot unmanned flying objects with a shotgun because it's just "a collision between unmanned flying objects some of which happen to be shotgun pellets", but that it would be illegal to use a rifle or handgun in the same situation because that would involve use of a "bullet".
45% is the national average. In some areas it's 80% (That article points out that the national figures for Iceland, Finland and Slovakia are 70%-80%)
It's a good idea - if your population is educated, then they are likely to be more productive, higher earners, less likely to be reliant on benefits etc.
And yet the UK has a fraction of the murder rate of the U.S. despite having a more urbanised population. 125 murders in Metropolitan London last year - a densely populated urban region with population of around 13 million with 5000 people per square km. Compare that to U.S. cities! 620 murders in the entire UK for a population of 62 million people. The majority of British people think gun control is a great idea.
A human has right to live.
Actually, many Americans wouldn't agree with that, when it comes to criminals, insurgents, people who live in occupied countries, etc. If the military drops a 500lb bomb on your neighborhood because the guy next door is an insurgent, you have no right to life, you're just "collateral damage". Whether you agree with this or not is a moral call, I'm just pointing out that the "right to life" is not universally acknowledged.
A human has right to live... A pigeon does not have that right -- if one believes otherwise, one has to prevent pigeons from being killed by predators.
Incorrect, because you are talking about two different things. You have suddenly switched from talking about the "right to live" to the "right to be protected".
Are you kidding? You really think the law is not going to recognise the difference between a helicopter and a bullet? By your logic, anyone could shoot down any unmanned launch craft and it would be completely legal because it's just "a collision between two unmanned flying objects". Try going to a local park and shooting all the kids tennis balls etc. midflight and see how far that argument gets you.
Don't know why this is modded Troll - shooting across a public highway is a crime (the incident report states "once shot, the helicopter lost lift and crash landed on the roadway of U.S. 601.") Responsible gun owners should be against people carrying out criminal acts with their guns.
If my property and privacy is invaded after I deny permission
So if your neighbor's house overlooks your fence, then you think you have the right to shoot him? Hmmm. I think not. By your logic this guy would have been liable for violating the airspace of thousands of New York residents: Aerial Video Footage of New York Taken By RC Plane
In fact, the law appears to be quite permissive as to use of aircraft in "uncontrolled" space. From Wikipedia:
In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has the sole authority to control all airspace, exclusively determining the rules and requirements for its use. Typically, in the "Uncontrolled" category of airspace, any pilot can fly any aircraft as low as he/she wants, subject to the requirement of maintaining a 500-foot (150 m) distance from people and man-made structures except for purposes of takeoff and landing, and not causing any hazard. Therefore, it appears to trump any individually claimed air rights, near airports especially."
Good lord, try actually reading one of the articles sometime! They were fully involved and fully aware of the negotiations to sell the rights to the trademark to "IP Application Development Limited".
The article doesn't say that. The article says "Apple contends that it acquired the iPad name when it bought rights in various countries from a Proview affiliate in Taiwan in 2009 for 35,000 British pounds ($55,000). Proview won a ruling from a mainland Chinese court in December that it was not bound by that sale."
They are both subsidiaries of the same company.
Which means very little under international law. There is no joint ownership of property. That's one of the points of using an international limited liability corporation in the first place..
Are you suggesting that wives don't have the ability to sell a family car?
Under some legal systems, no, they don't. If your legal system doesn't recognise joint ownership of property (which is the case for international corporate law) then one person obviously does not have the right to sell the property of another.
If your wife sells the family car, and you realize later the car's been sold, i think that's between you and your wife, not the buyer's fault.
But this is not a family car. This is a system where you and your wife live apart in two countries under different legal systems, and those legal systems don't recognise any concept of joint ownership, but do recognise that you each have an individual property right in that country. Transnational corporations do not have joint ownership of property.
It's more like: "If your brother registers a trademark in one country, and you register the same trademark in another, then your brother licenses his trademark, you have still not licensed yours."
Now, there may be an argument that transnational corporations should be liable and bound by actions of their subsidiaries or sister corps, but that would require some form of unified worldwide regulations, and that is not how the international corporate legal framework works at the moment.
Spoken like a person who doesn't understand the complex realities surrounding animal cruelty and animal care. There are plenty of respectable animal shelters that do put animals down. Here's why: some proportion of the animals that are brought in will never, ever be re-homed. For example, around 25% of the dogs brought in to dogs homes are from police seizures of illegal fighting dogs. These dogs have been raised to fight, and used in illegal dog fights. These animals are, and will always be, dangerous. It is just not usually possible to re-home them in a family environment. The larger animal centers get tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of animals in this kind of state every year. Their funding is limited, and they can't afford to house and feed and pay veterinary bills for every animal until it reaches the end of its natural life. At this point there is a difficult choice: a) let the animal starve (obviously cruel) b) kill the animal in a humane way (not nice, but less cruel). The shelters choose option b. It should be no surprise why, even some nation's Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals have spoken in favour of culling when faced with the alternative of having uncared for animals starve to death.
Until you posted this I'd never actually noticed that my account is also on the list. My crime appears to be making two comments (1 2) at the beginning of January calling out someone obviously posting from multiple accounts. I have a feeling this "list" is going to grow and grow...
http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/ has some magnified images. At 10x zoom I would guess the diameter is about 1mm, so maybe 0.1mm for the original dots...