It is well-recognized now that "foreign aid" in the form of shipping food, medicine, etc. to starving populations has done little but exacerbate the problem.
If you are right, then the same argument would apply to charity in response to, say, Hurricane Katrina. There is no difference between "foreign aid" and "domestic aid", apart from the perspective of the observer. Did providing housing, food, medicine etc. to the residents of New Orleans do "little but exacerbate the problem", because they then went on to have babies?
Your argument is based on the assumption that countries that need immediate aid have "starving populations" that can't feed themselves. This assumption is mostly false, as immediate charitable aid is usually provided in response to some specific and unavoidable change of events (natural disaster, failure of annual crops etc.) The vast majority of nations around the world are capable of providing enough food for their population, but when faced with natural tragedy, even people in the U.S. and Western Europe require food, shelter and medical assistance.
Knowing how to fish will do you no good if there are no fish in the river. Charitable aid needs to be prioritised firstly to prevent immediate loss of life, and beyond that to provide education with which people will be able to help themselves.
The quoted novelist appears to have used an unfortunate choice of words - he probably means "non-respecting-of-intellectual-property culture" rather than "open-source culture". The distinction is obvious to most slashdot readers, but presumably not to this novelist. The quote does not indicate that he has any problems with open-source software, I would imagine that his complaint is more about sites like Pirate Bay than Google.
The GPL strongly discourages proprietary forks - if somebody writes great code, anybody receiving that kernel can get that code and send it back upstream. There are proprietary forks of Apache - Apache is successful *despite* these forks - if it were GPLed, then the code that Oracle and IBM roll into their own Apache-based products would be much more likely to end up being contributed back upstream. One of IBM's Linux managers once made the point that it was the GPL that forces companies like IBM, Sun, Novell and Red Hat to work together on the kernel without having to spend months negotiating technology cross-licensing and transfer agreements for every single patch. The legal basis of the GPL is solid, and these large companies understand that they must release the source to their GPL derivative works. Once that is understood, there is no reason not to cooperate - there is far more to be gained by cooperating than by not.
This diagram shows the cost of not cooperating - note the number of forks of BSD, and then note the very simple vertical history of Linux. It was the GPL that ensured the Linux of 1991 was the same as the Linux of 2009.
(That is obviously not the full story - the other major factors can be put down to Linus turning out be a surprisingly good project manager, and the emergence of internet access at home, which enabled a new generation of hackers outside of university and the large corporations to begin contributing to open source projects).
Partly - commercial BSD derivatives and the BSD networking stack ending up in Windows 95 put off some developers - who wants to see their work being co-opted by Microsoft and other corporations in closed source products? Some people no doubt, but not the majority. Another effect of the licensing was that BSD splintered into different, slightly incompatible commercial forks. The GPL protected Linux from that fate - the free distributions were shipping more-or-less exactly the same kernel code as the commercial distributions - the general perception was that with Linux free didn't mean "less", it just meant "no telephone support". In BSD land, "free" (to many) meant "not as good as what Sun and IBM are selling".
Another factor was that BSD was seen by some Europeans as being controlled by some American labs and American universities. This made it seem less approachable - and harder to get your code into. Linus, in contrast, welcomed good patches with open arms. Linus was highly enthusiastic about people developing code for his kernel. The same enthusiasm for outsiders was not visible within the BSD community.
Yet another factor was the number of Linux distributions that sprung up. Competition is good - Debian, Slackware, Red Hat, etc. were all competing to make the best Linux distribution, and there were numerous other distributions trying to push them from the top. In contrast, BSD was more centrally controlled, and whilst there was some competition between distributions, there wasn't a great amount. Plus the licensing made forks more likely - with GPL and Linux, if someone wrote a good patch, it was highly likely that patch would end up in all Linux distributions fairly rapidly. The same could not be said of BSD and its various commercial forks.
If you are correct, and it isn't possible to have open borders, then how come the American borders were entirely open a couple of centuries ago? People all over Europe could (and sometimes did) jump aboard a ship and a couple of months later start their new lives in America. People in Mexico rode across the border on horses.
Here's another: If the US opened their borders (ports, specifically), you wouldn't be able to trust that the antibiotic you're taking isn't actually cyanide or an ineffective knockoff.
The U.S. borders are effectively already open for trade. If I want to move a shipping crate of goods from China or Europe to the U.S. I could do it with minimal problems. The main factor stopping fake drugs flooding the U.S. market is the rigorous control of supply lines between manufacturers and their distributors.
Here's another: If there was no barrier to trade in controlled arms and dual-use technology, North Korea and Iran (among others) would already have space-capable nuclear arsenals.
I don't see what this has to do with the GP's point about open borders - allowing the free movement of people between nation states (e.g. what already happens in the E.U.) does not mean that there are no barriers to the arms trade. In fact, looking at the E.U. as an example, the arms trade barriers are actually higher than most other places in the world, despite the people having freedom of movement.
For that matter, take any horrible thing you can imagine, from lethally incorrect medication to radioactive waste to biological and chemical weapons to slaves and make those things available anywhere in the world. Better get out your Geiger counter and make sure your toothpaste wasn't made with reactor-coolant sodium.
Wasn't slavery in the U.S. abolished before the introduction of modern immigration controls? Regardless, it is clear that the GP was talking about the free movement of people between borders, not free movement of weapons of mass destruction, so you are just attacking a strawman argument here.
The GPL covers distribution. A court would not order source code to be opened - it would order distribution of the derivative work to cease. In your example, infringement would occur when somebody took the closed source plugin and GPL licensed code and distributed them together, thus forming a derivative work. A user combining the two manually with no distribution would not violate the GPL.
I don't know any law in the US that states that it is illegal to be homosexual.
Well, technically it isn't illegal to be a pedophile either, but your life options would be severely restricted in comparison to a heterosexual citizen.
I do believe there are many religions who frown upon homosexuality.
Depends on the religion, culture and historical period. Anal sex, whether between a man and woman, or man and man, is considered unclean in Buddhism, but actual homosexual love isn't. Strict Islam is pretty much against homosexuality, but historically Islam was quite liberal and homosexuals were open and accepted in the past. There is a Muslim gay bar in Amsterdam so obviously there is a cultural dimension in addition to the religious one. There are accounts of European explorers who were shocked to see openly gay men on the streets of Middle Eastern towns when being gay was a crime punished by death in much of Europe:
Elsewhere in Islamic culture, however, the evidence is strikingly contradictory. Popular attitudes were more accepting than in Christendom, and European visitors were repeatedly shocked by the relaxed tolerance of Arabs, Turks, and Persians, who seemed to find nothing unnatural in love between men and boys. Behind this important cultural difference lies a vein of romanticism that runs deep through medieval Arab treatises on love. For Islamic writers, emotional intoxication might spring not just from the love of women, as with the troubadours, but also from the love of males.Homosexuality & Civilization By Louis Crompton
The death sentence in European nations was logically derived from the Bible:
If a man lie with mankind as he lieth with awoman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them." (Leviticus 20: 13, reinforcing the earlier prohibition in 18:22). From this dire injunction, which applies to male homosexuals only, stem all later Western laws prescribing the death penalty for sodomy.Canon Law
They aren't, the "scientists" are, for a variety of reasons which boil down to the age old canards of money or religion.
And this is where the grand conspiracy theory falls down. The idea that the vast majority of climate scientists around the world would all conspire to pervert science and perpetuate a grand fraud against humanity in exchange for money or to please God is ridiculous. These are guys who went into academia - a place where salaries a typically a fraction of the private sector - out of choice. If they were interested in money, why did they spent years toiling away on PhDs for a below-minimum-wage income? Why, after obtaining those PhDs, did they then choose to become low-paid postgrad researchers, publishing papers instead of earning big bucks in the private sector? So that after a couple of decades of hard work they could commit scientific fraud on a global scale in exchange for money!?! Unlikely.
"The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world."
So, the "hockey stick" is okay, unless you think that the US National Academy of Science are a) liars and b) taking part in a global conspiracy.
Providing you actually manage to get the raw unmodified data, which by many accounts is nearly impossible to do.
~95% of the British data is already freely available. The ~5% of data the British government licensed from other governments under contract is available if you work for the British government or a British university. Additionally, a pirated copy of the complete data set has already been leaked. So quit complaining that it's "nearly impossible" to get access to the data - only a small amount of the data is not available freely, the British government paid for it so that British researchers can use it, and if you actually did a degree or postgrad research in climatology at a British university you'd almost certainly be able to get a copy. And even if you didn't, and you really wanted a copy, you'd still be able to find a pirate copy of the leaked data somewhere on the net.
I was hoping someone would've already pointed that out! Additionally:
The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley CRU survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.
It's worth pointing out that at one point CRU were getting over 50 FOI requests per week from climate skeptics. Maybe it's more now. That is a crazy additional workload for the CRU scientists who are paid to do actual research and not fill out FOI replies.
What percentage of the phone does the chipset patent account for? The patent fees ought to be the same regardless of whether the device is an super expensive smartphone or cheap handset. I can get a brand new 3G basic Nokia handset for 1/7th the cost of a new HTC Hero - the huge difference can't be down to the patents. I would expect that the more expensive phones require more expensive American and European engineers, more marketing etc. In contrast, the Chinese operations are very efficient, labour costs for engineers and assembly line staff are very low, plus the Chinese market is a lot more competitive due to low artificial barriers on trade (ie. fewer patent and copyright issues).
And flying a plane into the WTC? Osama viewed himself and his group as being at war with the U.S. They had bombed the U.S.S. Cole, the U.S. had attacked their training camps with cruise missiles. The question is whether attacking enemy civilians during a time of war should be classed as "terrorism"? Most people would not call the attacks of Germany and Britain on each others civilian populations during WWII "terrorism", even though the blanket targeting of civilian populations did occur (ie. the bombing of civilians was not an accident, or "collateral damage", it was a deliberate act designed to kill and undermine moral).
Why was the bombing of civilian cities (those with no or little military infrastructure) during WWII considered valid, and yet now is considered "terrorism"? Or is there some further factor that people consider - that WWII was a "real war", but the violence with Osama was somewhat "less" of a war, and therefore targeting civilians was not justified?
I'd like to point out that a Terrorist (in general) deliberately targets civilians.
Unless the targeting in question is carried out by the government of a nation state, in which case it usually gets called "war" or "policing". The word "terrorism" originates from the French government which used a reign of terror to rule the country and eliminate enemies of the state. In this sense, applying the "terrorism" label to a government was apt, but it has fallen out of favour since then.
Not to say nature is disreputable on either, but there is nothing wrong with saying reliable at one thing and maybe not so much in another domain. its a common enough situation in life.
A scientific journal is either respected or not. You can't just pick and choose the articles you like and then say "Yeah, Nature is a great journal, but it sucks in fields X, Y and Z.". If it actually does suck in certain fields but is publishing papers in those fields, then it isn't a great journal, is it?
Of course, the real problem is people who decide that a 140-year old science journal, widely considered to be one of the most prestigious in the world, is bogus because the papers it publishes conflict with their own personal right-wing political views.
The US has rightly pointed at corruption at the UN, but this brings subverting world institutions for gain to a new level.
The U.S. National Academy of Science has endorsed anthropogenic global warming:
"The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world". (see Climate myths: The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong
"Observations show that warming of the climate is unequivocal. The global warming observed over the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases. These emissions come mainly from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas), with important contributions from the clearing of forests, agricultural practices, and other activities."
Nature, New Scientist and the BBC
So Nature, New Scientist, the BBC, the U.S. National Academy of Science, NASA, the Smithsonian Institute, the National Science Foundation, the national science academies of every G8 nation etc. etc. are all part of some global conspiracy to defraud the human species?
I imagine all scientific journals will be quite clear on this point. We can't let a few suspect emails destroy millions of dollars in research grants.
Fixed it for you.
Do you honestly believe that tens of thousands of scientists around the world are engaging in a global conspiracy of fraud in order to obtain research grants? That the national academies of science of every major industrialised nation are actively working to perpetuate a fraud against the entire human species merely in order to obtain research grants? This does not sound a little far-fetched?
The United States National Academy of Science investigated the "Hockey Stick" and found it to be valid. Their report states:
"The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world". (see Climate myths: The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong)
Or do you believe that the U.S. National Academy of Science is also taking part in this supposed global conspiracy?
many of the skeptics have been supporting the solar variation side of the theory of global climate change, and (surprise!) it matches up quite nicely to observed temperature changes
Even if solar forcing in the past was more important than this estimate suggests, as some scientists think, there is no correlation between solar activity and the strong warming during the past 40 years... Direct measurements of solar output since 1978 show a steady rise and fall over the 11-year sunspot cycle, but no upwards or downward trend. Similarly, there is no trend in direct measurements of the Sun's ultraviolet output and in cosmic rays. So for the period for which we have direct, reliable records, the Earth has warmed dramatically even though there has been no corresponding rise in any kind of solar activity.
The Sun's energy output has not increased since direct measurements began in 1978 (see Climate myth special: Global warming is down to the Sun, not humans). If increased solar output really was responsible, we should be seeing warming on all the planets and their moons, not just Mars and Pluto.
None of these things have happened over the last twenty years, therefore THEY WERE WRONG.
So, a number of different scientists made a range of different predictions, each having some different confidence interval, and because *some* do not come true, you conclude that "THEY ARE ALL WRONG"..?
Slashdot Mirror
It is well-recognized now that "foreign aid" in the form of shipping food, medicine, etc. to starving populations has done little but exacerbate the problem.
If you are right, then the same argument would apply to charity in response to, say, Hurricane Katrina. There is no difference between "foreign aid" and "domestic aid", apart from the perspective of the observer. Did providing housing, food, medicine etc. to the residents of New Orleans do "little but exacerbate the problem", because they then went on to have babies?
Your argument is based on the assumption that countries that need immediate aid have "starving populations" that can't feed themselves. This assumption is mostly false, as immediate charitable aid is usually provided in response to some specific and unavoidable change of events (natural disaster, failure of annual crops etc.) The vast majority of nations around the world are capable of providing enough food for their population, but when faced with natural tragedy, even people in the U.S. and Western Europe require food, shelter and medical assistance.
Knowing how to fish will do you no good if there are no fish in the river. Charitable aid needs to be prioritised firstly to prevent immediate loss of life, and beyond that to provide education with which people will be able to help themselves.
The quoted novelist appears to have used an unfortunate choice of words - he probably means "non-respecting-of-intellectual-property culture" rather than "open-source culture". The distinction is obvious to most slashdot readers, but presumably not to this novelist. The quote does not indicate that he has any problems with open-source software, I would imagine that his complaint is more about sites like Pirate Bay than Google.
The GPL strongly discourages proprietary forks - if somebody writes great code, anybody receiving that kernel can get that code and send it back upstream. There are proprietary forks of Apache - Apache is successful *despite* these forks - if it were GPLed, then the code that Oracle and IBM roll into their own Apache-based products would be much more likely to end up being contributed back upstream. One of IBM's Linux managers once made the point that it was the GPL that forces companies like IBM, Sun, Novell and Red Hat to work together on the kernel without having to spend months negotiating technology cross-licensing and transfer agreements for every single patch. The legal basis of the GPL is solid, and these large companies understand that they must release the source to their GPL derivative works. Once that is understood, there is no reason not to cooperate - there is far more to be gained by cooperating than by not.
This diagram shows the cost of not cooperating - note the number of forks of BSD, and then note the very simple vertical history of Linux. It was the GPL that ensured the Linux of 1991 was the same as the Linux of 2009.
(That is obviously not the full story - the other major factors can be put down to Linus turning out be a surprisingly good project manager, and the emergence of internet access at home, which enabled a new generation of hackers outside of university and the large corporations to begin contributing to open source projects).
Just because of the permissive license?
Partly - commercial BSD derivatives and the BSD networking stack ending up in Windows 95 put off some developers - who wants to see their work being co-opted by Microsoft and other corporations in closed source products? Some people no doubt, but not the majority. Another effect of the licensing was that BSD splintered into different, slightly incompatible commercial forks. The GPL protected Linux from that fate - the free distributions were shipping more-or-less exactly the same kernel code as the commercial distributions - the general perception was that with Linux free didn't mean "less", it just meant "no telephone support". In BSD land, "free" (to many) meant "not as good as what Sun and IBM are selling".
Another factor was that BSD was seen by some Europeans as being controlled by some American labs and American universities. This made it seem less approachable - and harder to get your code into. Linus, in contrast, welcomed good patches with open arms. Linus was highly enthusiastic about people developing code for his kernel. The same enthusiasm for outsiders was not visible within the BSD community.
Yet another factor was the number of Linux distributions that sprung up. Competition is good - Debian, Slackware, Red Hat, etc. were all competing to make the best Linux distribution, and there were numerous other distributions trying to push them from the top. In contrast, BSD was more centrally controlled, and whilst there was some competition between distributions, there wasn't a great amount. Plus the licensing made forks more likely - with GPL and Linux, if someone wrote a good patch, it was highly likely that patch would end up in all Linux distributions fairly rapidly. The same could not be said of BSD and its various commercial forks.
If you are correct, and it isn't possible to have open borders, then how come the American borders were entirely open a couple of centuries ago? People all over Europe could (and sometimes did) jump aboard a ship and a couple of months later start their new lives in America. People in Mexico rode across the border on horses.
Here's another: If the US opened their borders (ports, specifically), you wouldn't be able to trust that the antibiotic you're taking isn't actually cyanide or an ineffective knockoff.
The U.S. borders are effectively already open for trade. If I want to move a shipping crate of goods from China or Europe to the U.S. I could do it with minimal problems. The main factor stopping fake drugs flooding the U.S. market is the rigorous control of supply lines between manufacturers and their distributors.
Here's another: If there was no barrier to trade in controlled arms and dual-use technology, North Korea and Iran (among others) would already have space-capable nuclear arsenals.
I don't see what this has to do with the GP's point about open borders - allowing the free movement of people between nation states (e.g. what already happens in the E.U.) does not mean that there are no barriers to the arms trade. In fact, looking at the E.U. as an example, the arms trade barriers are actually higher than most other places in the world, despite the people having freedom of movement.
For that matter, take any horrible thing you can imagine, from lethally incorrect medication to radioactive waste to biological and chemical weapons to slaves and make those things available anywhere in the world. Better get out your Geiger counter and make sure your toothpaste wasn't made with reactor-coolant sodium.
Wasn't slavery in the U.S. abolished before the introduction of modern immigration controls? Regardless, it is clear that the GP was talking about the free movement of people between borders, not free movement of weapons of mass destruction, so you are just attacking a strawman argument here.
As far as I recall, that law was the reason the Ploughshares Four were acquitted.
The GPL covers distribution. A court would not order source code to be opened - it would order distribution of the derivative work to cease. In your example, infringement would occur when somebody took the closed source plugin and GPL licensed code and distributed them together, thus forming a derivative work. A user combining the two manually with no distribution would not violate the GPL.
I don't know any law in the US that states that it is illegal to be homosexual.
Well, technically it isn't illegal to be a pedophile either, but your life options would be severely restricted in comparison to a heterosexual citizen.
I do believe there are many religions who frown upon homosexuality.
Depends on the religion, culture and historical period. Anal sex, whether between a man and woman, or man and man, is considered unclean in Buddhism, but actual homosexual love isn't. Strict Islam is pretty much against homosexuality, but historically Islam was quite liberal and homosexuals were open and accepted in the past. There is a Muslim gay bar in Amsterdam so obviously there is a cultural dimension in addition to the religious one. There are accounts of European explorers who were shocked to see openly gay men on the streets of Middle Eastern towns when being gay was a crime punished by death in much of Europe:
Elsewhere in Islamic culture, however, the evidence is strikingly contradictory. Popular attitudes were more accepting than in Christendom, and European visitors were repeatedly shocked by the relaxed tolerance of Arabs, Turks, and Persians, who seemed to find nothing unnatural in love between men and boys. Behind this important cultural difference lies a vein of romanticism that runs deep through medieval Arab treatises on love. For Islamic writers, emotional intoxication might spring not just from the love of women, as with the troubadours, but also from the love of males. Homosexuality & Civilization By Louis Crompton
The death sentence in European nations was logically derived from the Bible:
If a man lie with mankind as he lieth with awoman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them." (Leviticus 20: 13, reinforcing the earlier prohibition in 18:22). From this dire injunction, which applies to male homosexuals only, stem all later Western laws prescribing the death penalty for sodomy. Canon Law
They aren't, the "scientists" are, for a variety of reasons which boil down to the age old canards of money or religion.
And this is where the grand conspiracy theory falls down. The idea that the vast majority of climate scientists around the world would all conspire to pervert science and perpetuate a grand fraud against humanity in exchange for money or to please God is ridiculous. These are guys who went into academia - a place where salaries a typically a fraction of the private sector - out of choice. If they were interested in money, why did they spent years toiling away on PhDs for a below-minimum-wage income? Why, after obtaining those PhDs, did they then choose to become low-paid postgrad researchers, publishing papers instead of earning big bucks in the private sector? So that after a couple of decades of hard work they could commit scientific fraud on a global scale in exchange for money!?! Unlikely.
Who to believe - you (some random guy on slashdot), or the US National Academy of Science?...
The Hockey Stick debacle came about because someone used math they didn't really understand... or was outright fraud.
Wrong. Climate myths: The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong. The "hockey stick" was investigated by a 2006 report of the US National Academy of Science, which found that:
"The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world."
So, the "hockey stick" is okay, unless you think that the US National Academy of Science are a) liars and b) taking part in a global conspiracy.
Providing you actually manage to get the raw unmodified data, which by many accounts is nearly impossible to do.
~95% of the British data is already freely available. The ~5% of data the British government licensed from other governments under contract is available if you work for the British government or a British university. Additionally, a pirated copy of the complete data set has already been leaked. So quit complaining that it's "nearly impossible" to get access to the data - only a small amount of the data is not available freely, the British government paid for it so that British researchers can use it, and if you actually did a degree or postgrad research in climatology at a British university you'd almost certainly be able to get a copy. And even if you didn't, and you really wanted a copy, you'd still be able to find a pirate copy of the leaked data somewhere on the net.
They do not seek to convey an understanding of the data, methods, and conclusions.
They don't?
I was hoping someone would've already pointed that out! Additionally:
The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley CRU survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.
That is a Strawman argument. No scientist has claimed that every region of the world must experience warming simultaneously in order for the global mean to increase: Regional cooling does not disprove global warming.
He initially responded to all FOI requests
It's worth pointing out that at one point CRU were getting over 50 FOI requests per week from climate skeptics. Maybe it's more now. That is a crazy additional workload for the CRU scientists who are paid to do actual research and not fill out FOI replies.
What percentage of the phone does the chipset patent account for? The patent fees ought to be the same regardless of whether the device is an super expensive smartphone or cheap handset. I can get a brand new 3G basic Nokia handset for 1/7th the cost of a new HTC Hero - the huge difference can't be down to the patents. I would expect that the more expensive phones require more expensive American and European engineers, more marketing etc. In contrast, the Chinese operations are very efficient, labour costs for engineers and assembly line staff are very low, plus the Chinese market is a lot more competitive due to low artificial barriers on trade (ie. fewer patent and copyright issues).
The Tiger G3 is a HTC Hero clone, running exactly the same software, for about 30% of the price (comparing sim-free, brand new ebay prices).
And flying a plane into the WTC? Osama viewed himself and his group as being at war with the U.S. They had bombed the U.S.S. Cole, the U.S. had attacked their training camps with cruise missiles. The question is whether attacking enemy civilians during a time of war should be classed as "terrorism"? Most people would not call the attacks of Germany and Britain on each others civilian populations during WWII "terrorism", even though the blanket targeting of civilian populations did occur (ie. the bombing of civilians was not an accident, or "collateral damage", it was a deliberate act designed to kill and undermine moral).
Why was the bombing of civilian cities (those with no or little military infrastructure) during WWII considered valid, and yet now is considered "terrorism"? Or is there some further factor that people consider - that WWII was a "real war", but the violence with Osama was somewhat "less" of a war, and therefore targeting civilians was not justified?
I'd like to point out that a Terrorist (in general) deliberately targets civilians.
Unless the targeting in question is carried out by the government of a nation state, in which case it usually gets called "war" or "policing". The word "terrorism" originates from the French government which used a reign of terror to rule the country and eliminate enemies of the state. In this sense, applying the "terrorism" label to a government was apt, but it has fallen out of favour since then.
the goal of terrorism is to cause terror
The goal of terrorism is to effect political and social change. The terror is just a means to an end.
Not to say nature is disreputable on either, but there is nothing wrong with saying reliable at one thing and maybe not so much in another domain. its a common enough situation in life.
A scientific journal is either respected or not. You can't just pick and choose the articles you like and then say "Yeah, Nature is a great journal, but it sucks in fields X, Y and Z.". If it actually does suck in certain fields but is publishing papers in those fields, then it isn't a great journal, is it?
Of course, the real problem is people who decide that a 140-year old science journal, widely considered to be one of the most prestigious in the world, is bogus because the papers it publishes conflict with their own personal right-wing political views.
The US has rightly pointed at corruption at the UN, but this brings subverting world institutions for gain to a new level.
The U.S. National Academy of Science has endorsed anthropogenic global warming:
"The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world". (see Climate myths: The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong
The U.S. Global Change Research Program found that:
"Observations show that warming of the climate is unequivocal. The global warming observed over the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases. These emissions come mainly from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas), with important contributions from the clearing of forests, agricultural practices, and other activities."
Nature, New Scientist and the BBC
So Nature, New Scientist, the BBC, the U.S. National Academy of Science, NASA, the Smithsonian Institute, the National Science Foundation, the national science academies of every G8 nation etc. etc. are all part of some global conspiracy to defraud the human species?
I imagine all scientific journals will be quite clear on this point. We can't let a few suspect emails destroy millions of dollars in research grants.
Fixed it for you.
Do you honestly believe that tens of thousands of scientists around the world are engaging in a global conspiracy of fraud in order to obtain research grants? That the national academies of science of every major industrialised nation are actively working to perpetuate a fraud against the entire human species merely in order to obtain research grants? This does not sound a little far-fetched?
The United States National Academy of Science investigated the "Hockey Stick" and found it to be valid. Their report states:
"The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world". (see Climate myths: The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong)
Or do you believe that the U.S. National Academy of Science is also taking part in this supposed global conspiracy?
many of the skeptics have been supporting the solar variation side of the theory of global climate change, and (surprise!) it matches up quite nicely to observed temperature changes
From Climate myths: Global warming is down to the Sun, not humans:
Even if solar forcing in the past was more important than this estimate suggests, as some scientists think, there is no correlation between solar activity and the strong warming during the past 40 years... Direct measurements of solar output since 1978 show a steady rise and fall over the 11-year sunspot cycle, but no upwards or downward trend. Similarly, there is no trend in direct measurements of the Sun's ultraviolet output and in cosmic rays. So for the period for which we have direct, reliable records, the Earth has warmed dramatically even though there has been no corresponding rise in any kind of solar activity.
and from Climate myths: Mars and Pluto are warming too
The Sun's energy output has not increased since direct measurements began in 1978 (see Climate myth special: Global warming is down to the Sun, not humans). If increased solar output really was responsible, we should be seeing warming on all the planets and their moons, not just Mars and Pluto.
None of these things have happened over the last twenty years, therefore THEY WERE WRONG.
So, a number of different scientists made a range of different predictions, each having some different confidence interval, and because *some* do not come true, you conclude that "THEY ARE ALL WRONG"..?