Um, I just logged onto my one AOL account, and I opted out of everything in one minute fifteen seconds. Could have gone faster, but I was being sure to hit that buttons correctly.
Haven't been bothered by them for years.
Now, Ebay...
Ever since I got an Ebay account, I've been drowning in oceans of Viagra, Credit Checks, Spyware, yadda yadda.
Point is, AOL is not the Satan of the online world. They don't have to be; they're rich as hell. It's the smaller operators who are selling our souls for us.
CNN, and all the others you list, are moderate to conservative entities, if they can be characterized at all. Besides, "liberalism" is defined as open-mindedness, fairness, and the ability to see all sides of a story. Any TV network should be proud to be called such.
But they are not "liberal". CNN is changing its lineup to suck up to the FOX crowd. ABC, and most certainly NBC are owned by extremely conservative corporations, Disney and GE respectively. The bosses of those Republican companies are influencing hiring and firing of upper and middle level management, causing a tilt towards the right that is becoming discernible even to a casual viewer.
FOX is not in the fairness business. It follows the meme, a wrong one, that all who do not agree with their views are Liberal, and part of a Liberal powerbase that they are in biz to negate.
FOX is Murdoch's wet dream. He wants a no-apologies propoganda machine for deregulation, insulting Clinton, religion, slandering Clinton, corporate welfare kings, removing Clinton, military buildups, destroying Clinton, and destroying any damned body that gets in his way to enormous wealth and power for himself and all of his ideological stripe.
No, I'm not going to cite sources. I 'm not going to exhaust myself proving water is wet for the millionth time. And anyway, it is the hallmark of conservatism that they can NEVER be wrong, and that the other side IS. And immoral and evil and godless and...
Liberalism's hallmark, and the hallmark of good journalism as well, is the ability to see all sides of an argument, and to doubt and question deeply held beliefs. FOX fails this test, and is not a journalistic network. It is an attack vehicle for a narrow slice of American life -- angry white suburban USAian men who think that blacks have more rights than they, that all their money is being shipped overseas, that women are too damned uppity, and that their religion is the right and only one. And like lots of guns in case the Guvmint needs overthrowing, or blacks leave the cities and attack their suburban strongholds... believe me, I grew up reading the pamphets spread by milita, Birchers and similar. I'm not exaggerating.
Anyhow, to sum up: Murdoch is a right Uberwinger who created the FOX NEWS network to destroy the influence of anyone who does not support his ideology. FOX exists to demonize its opponents and slavishly promote its politicians.
"Liberals" (anyone not a Murdochian) have no such parallel network of ruthless lying attack dogs. By "Liberals" I mean the 75% of the USA that are not conservatives.
how would you react if your child, aged 9, interested in technology, view this page and accidently clicks on a goatse link?
I really do think we censor our memories.
"My child" would find erotica anyway. Magazines are everywhere; they always were. I don't see how showing the pictures on a monitor makes it so much more necessary to control the world the child sees.
We - almost ALL of us -- saw erotic imagery and videos when we were growing up. We did not die.
Children are interested in sexuality, just like sports or arts or painting. If they are so inclined, they can look at their friend's dad's porn stash under the dresser. And they always will, worlds without end, amen.
The problem with these "filters" is that they do not work. Many of the cypernanny filters are put together by organizations that can, how can we put this, have a bias against homosexuals, birth control, sexual disease information... you get the point. And that's not speculation, that is a fact. Planned Parenthood is blocked, or at least was, on some school filters in the U.S.
Who chooses the material to be blocked? Who watches the watchers?
Well, do what I am doing: get a Shuttle SV24 barebone aluminum mini-micro case.
It has one external 5.25" bay, one PCI slot, built-in AGP video, sound, Firewire, USB, composite video out, a drawer-mounted hard drive bay, and only weighs 6 pounds. It measures about 11" in all dimensions.
The main drawback is the CPU: you can install either a Celery or a PIII.
BUT: I understand that on or about April 1, a new version of the case is coming out. Here's hoping for AMD support!
I don't think he said the P4 is slower; he said that the fully overclocked P4, with a 1 GHz advantage, was not really all that much faster for everyday tasks than a 2000+ Athlon.
Apple may have four percent of the desktop market, but here Barlow is not thinking logically. But to be fair, few people think this out.
Apple is NOT shrinking or losing by having a four percent market share. Think about it: they sell far more PCs to far more people than they ever have. They are a raging success.
What happened here is that the number of PC owners has grown by orders of magnitude since the eighties. Wintel grew, Apple grew. Both paradigms are successful.
By its very nature, Apple cannot succeed in the corporate world. It's about flair, being original, being artistic, being different. Since most of you do work corporate office jobs, you you that anyone showing such traits are not going to make it big -- conformity in large groups is essential to avoid conflict.
Yeah, a Mac is just a PC, but the idea is what counts. Try dropping an iMac into a Wintel office. Not conforming, not goodnik.
So before Barlow goes religious, he out to think of numbers of Macs used, not the proportion of the total PC base.
After 20 years of watching the ongoing corporatization and the creation of a conservative media hegemony, I think the word "evil" applies.
Bush has had a revelation from God. He believes that he has been charged with eliminating evil-doers from the planet -- not a joke --by God Himself. If you read what he says, he is on a holy war. Any formerly Commie country, except China of course, is evil. Anything that embarassed his daddy was evil. Anything Clinton did... never mind. Saudi Arabia was the source of the terrorists for the most part, but curiously our oil sources don't seem to be evil.
Barlow, on the other hand, sees a real evil: the almost absolute monopolization, coming Real Soon Now, of all news media outlets by mega-giga-corps, leading to the pasteurization of human thought on the planet. Dead real truth. Current forerunner of such: the almost complete adoration of the current president, and the complete lack of criticism of his past, his current policies, or his actual words. This is a top-down move from the highest levels of the corporations such as AOL-TW and GE and Disney. And across the country, in many city papers, editors and reporters that aren't toeing the line are being canned. Think about it: how many reporters and editors were fired for critizing Clinton? Interesting dynamic there, dontcha think?
Barlow is right, as should be obvious. We're being sewn up into a certalized corporatocracy by the day, and no one is noticing. MS will use.Net to own everyone's transactions. And maybe BillG doesn't care about your private life, but what about future BillGs twenty years from now, or forty? Absolute power is being channeled into boardrooms that have no government oversight of their actions. Enron shows us how intertwined the power/money brokers are with the government. They've become inseparable. And these characters are going to decide what we see and hear on the net and any other channel of info?
He's understating the problem, if anything else. It illustrates what he is saying: any point of view not held by the majority, such as his, are "paranoid anticorporate radical", and will be discounted, marginalized, and eventually, erased from mainstream media entirely. He is right in all he is saying, but the rather patronizing representative of the conservative majority interviewing him practically giggles at him.
The tone of the article was aloof and slightly patronizing. The quote:
"the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 agreement that banned online distribution of companies' intellectual property" tells you which side CNET is on.
When he passes from the intellectual scene, there will be no more dissenting voices in his league left to interview. And so his observation is correct: eventually, given the arch questions in the article by the reporter, CNET and similar corporate-owned outlets will not interview such "flakes" as he. His (accurate) observations will no longer be part of public discussion, and one tone, one philosophy will prevail: corporate absolutism, with one or two conservative behemoths owning all the news media that matter.
Unless, as per the court decision this week, a major conglomerate like AOL can slowly buy up all the music labels and telecom companies, then refuse permission to trade digital files via their Omni-Network without prior authentification vis-a-vis copyrights.
Acid rain has no noticable effect on tree growth [Figure 98]
Even if so, so what? It kills lakes, reducing them to algae ponds. Depends on what he wants to look at, doesn't it?
Smoke, lead, SO2, ozone, NO2, CO concentrations in the air (US and UK) decreased steadily over the last 25 years [Figures 88, 90, 92, 93, 94, 95]
And so? They are down because of decades of war fought by environmentalista against car and oil companies. If it is indeed down, let us pay homage to their unpaid labor.
What is happening is sort of a decentralized network of more-or-less in-agreement people who believe that there is a lefty environmental/liberal agenda that needs to be neutralized.
What I've observed in the last eight years or so is that such right-leaning people have learned to spike the media lemonade, by creating pundits that sound reasonable and can be trotted out in conservative publications and new shows initially, then slowly become stars of mainstream popular press.
The actual scientists and greens are slowly pushed off the spectrum as moderates become the new liberals, and the far right simply becomes conservative.
It's worked on a lot of issues. Do remember that most publishing houses and news services are now owned and operated by extremely conservative men, and that bias is making itself present in many ways. Look at Michael Moore's book, "Stupid White Men". It was yanked from distribution months ago because he would not tone down his critique of Bush, and his publisher spiked an already printed book rather than publish something that offended his political views. It's now published, but the point is, non-conservative views are disappearing quietly from TV and book and newspapers. And what is indeed left is being redefined. Fox News is "Fair and Balanced" with moderate conservatives posing as liberals while right-wing loons are the new "mainstream". Wish I had got that memo.
Point is, this book is out there, and being pushed hard, even to the point of getting flogged on Slashdot, because there are people with axes to grind making sure it influences opinion.
From what I understand, he uses statistical games and rhetoric to mash environmental issues. Very Bell Curve; I assume he's a darling on Fox and CNN and MS-NBC. Pity I don't watch them anymore.
The thing is, there is no heavily-backed anti-Lomborg to refute him. Science isn't organized that way. So this book will have an impact, not that one is needed with this admin in power.
Been to Mexico City lately? It's what our cities would be like if the air couldn't move the pollution away.
Yes, the air is relatively clearer. That's because environmental activists, and real scientists, fought for decades against the Lomborgs of the right, and won... sometimes.
So give those "dishonest" people the acclamation they deserve. They fought the fight no one else cared about, and won the day with sanity.
No insanity is rolling back in, slick with media smarts and tons of cash. Here we go again...
It isn't what you are doing now that is the problem. It is the precedent you set when that trail is widened and the asphalt laid down.
What happens in 10, 20, 30, 50 years to that trail?
By starting the encroachment, you start a landslide of destruction -- someday.
The world of our roads is large enough. The idea is to draw a line, and say "no more". Leave some of it in peace.
The problem is that a little damage today results in the rationalizations that turn your trails into highways and subdivisions in a few decades. Population pressure is infinite.
We have so much developed land. At some point you have to say stop.
He is basically saying that almost every ecologist in the world is a part of a Green Anti-Corporate Conspiracy, and that it is his sad but necessary duty to correct the record.
Please.
This hack has been thoroughly discredited long ago. The reason he is alive is the same reason Velikovsky's "World's in Flight" is still alive, Christian fundamentalist creation dogma is considered "science", the American majority believes the guvmint is hiding aliens, and that trees cause most of the world's pollution.
I'm not going to cover the science. I'll leave that to the scientists, poor bastards.
Americans believe science to be a democratic body of knowledge. It isn't. It is a method AND a body of accepted theory and knowledge. The opinion of of the majority of non-scientists is not admissible as evidence. Popularity wih libertarian corporate theory has no bearing on the science.
It isn't a "religion" with "high priests", either. People who claim such usually have a clerical collar hidden under theor clothes, somewhere, and are using the "accuse the enemy of that which you are doing" method of attack which is working so well for right-wing zealots.
Lomborg is not arguing science. He is playing rhetorical games to please anti-science, a large segment of the American population, and to shore up the position of corporations and business, who are pursuing a long-term populist project to eliminate science from political decision and replace it with industry-friendly pseudo science. It's about money, money, money. In America, they will win. Everywhere else, they look on aghast as we embrace superstition and business to the exclusion of sanity.
Lomborg pinpoints flaws in arguments on the small scale in order to rhetorically destroy the larger arguments. Problem is, his NEED TO BELIEVE OTHERWISE aside, we are performing a worldwide uncontrolled atmospheric experiment. It's in the beginning stages now, but as the population doubles every thirty years or so, and the other nations follow our industrial example, the factors involved in the experiment will grow exponentially. The trick is to stop the disasters now, while they are small, before they chaotically grow into something we can't even imagine.
I notice a lot of the argument pro-Lomborg (I do hope I am spelling the name right) is based on a, there is no word better to describe it, hatred of a made-up enemy called the Greens. No doubt communistic, liberal, and out to destroy our money.
Problem is, the Greens are a political party with their own agenda. Ecologists without political axes to grind are in vast agreement that we are changing the ecosphere. How could we not be? It's just a matter of how.
Also, ecologists, meteorologists, and other scientists who blow the danger horn are not going to get rich bucking the power base and right-wing fringes who are indeed running things now. They are taking chances and not getting rich, just to do the right thing. Their opponents, who are trying to defuse them by using any number of dirty intellectual tricks, ARE on the side of people who will give them much money. I tend to believe the people doing it for the good of all mankind rather than people who are representing themselves and their rich patrons.
As for "keeping an open mind". Scientists do this professionally. They know how. What they don't do is refute every opposing opinion. They did a lot of the argument before, when the evidence for the theories were collected. If someone comes forward to dispute it, they have an extraordinary claim, and it is their job to provide extraordinary proof. Lomborg does not do this; his exposition is directed toward non-scientists who are pre-disposed to believe for political reasons, and for people who simply don't understand the issues involved and can be swayed through rhetoric alone.
Even Jerry Pournelle, as conservative a scientist who ever was whelped, and a proponent of the Bell Curve book, was convinced a few years ago, after reading the accumulated science, that we are conducting a massive uncontrolled experiment on the Earth's atmosphere. If HE, after all those years of asking for evidence, was convinced it is happening, I am frightened.
As for "Greens" not having "evidence", I can only say that after fifty years of study, and all the accumulated evidence presented, if a Slashdot reader says such a thing, that reader is in no mood to ever be convinced. It is hopeless. They accuse others of ideological bias, but they are convinced that no evidence can prove the other side's case. Right-wing corporate mindset is the only thing I can call it; there is no real term for this ideology. No evidence will ever work, no study will ever be complete, and the end result is that in the face of a half century of science and the consensus of the world's scientists, the laws governing pollution will be overturned. The rest of the world will slowly change their laws as well, in a rolling ideological tidal wave, resulting a REAL pollution experiment that will change the world.
Re:What is needed is a Stability Report...
on
Socket-A Chipset Roundup
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Here I am, a rather indifferent assembler of PC's, but I have to think: these problems sound the problems I used to have when my box overheated.
You have the latest and greatest everything with 400+ ps's... lots of heat there. Mayhap something simple, like say, a spot on the mobo is heating more than others, and causing these problems.
In the olden days (3 years ago) I'd have taken the cover off the box, and directed a commerical box fan on the assembly. But that can't work anymore -- the air must circulate just so...
Well, I can listen and learn. No dragon boards for my next box.
Um, no, Napster did not trade materials, never copied anything, never sent any materials to anyone, and did not know if any of the material, particularly, was copyrighted.
Napster was an index of file names and locations. That's all.
The judge in that case was a dedicated champion of intellectual property laws, even if she had to create some for them to violate. She made a spectacular fool of herself by showing ignorance of the technology and personal animosity towards the defendants.
And the damage she created spreads outwards, like a tsunamic shock wave.
Being sterilized by radiation cannot mutate the flies. And furthermore, if they are sterilized, they can't procreate, so they aren't going to hurt much.
Of course when they cancel the sci-fi network I will be appropriately irritated... and at the same time have more free time to spend on more creative, entertaining, useful pursuits!
- Hackers don't kick your door in. - Hackers don't publicize your name as a "suspect", thus destroying your reputation. - Hackers don't pauperize you with legal costs. - Hackers aren't prosecutors concerned with obtaining as many convictions as possible. - Hackers cannot put you in prison. - Hackers cannot shoot you dead if you try to get away. - Hackers don't joke about your future rape schedule in their prison. - Hackers can't hold you indefinitely in an undisclosed location without counsel or contact. - Hackers can be a nuissance, but they rarely destroy your life. - Hackers aren't your government.
There were no "secrets' to the atomic bomb. The physics were well understood in the thirties. The mechanism to ignite fission was pure engineering. The only thing remotely secret was the method to refine the uranium, which was solved three ways. But any decent engineer could have come up with a solution. The design of the H-bomb was also pretty straightforward. Fission ignites dueterium/tritium, bomb goes boom. For fifty five years, the myth of the Secrets has been bandied around. Hell, a few years ago, some poor schmuch at Los Alamos was put into solitary for revealing "secrets" of our nuclear research, and also for being suspiciously Chinese-American. It was a complete crock. There were no secrets, he wasn't a spy, and it was all politically motivated, pretty much as it was in the Fifties.
Cisco: an example of why corporations should not have the rights of humans.
They have no morals.
Seriously, they sealed a billion people behind a wall. This is... is... sick. There should be no payment sufficient to build such a filthy thing. It's like building the Berlin wall in the '40's, or creating well-designed torture chambers for some hellish country's prison. What greed!!
Bandwidth limitations: artificial, and should never have happened. But now that the content providers are becoming the bandwidth providers, we won't get bandwidth to burn anymore. Though 802.11 networks might give us the capability sometime, since they are constrained by neither profit nor control.
Hybrid Napster/Gnutellas: now legally impossible in the U.S., and shortly everywhere else in the world. Any volunteer index node owners would be in a world of legal pain, with their homes and future threatened. So sadly, not an option.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, I just logged onto my one AOL account, and I opted out of everything in one minute fifteen seconds. Could have gone faster, but I was being sure to hit that buttons correctly.
Haven't been bothered by them for years.
Now, Ebay...
Ever since I got an Ebay account, I've been drowning in oceans of Viagra, Credit Checks, Spyware, yadda yadda.
Point is, AOL is not the Satan of the online world. They don't have to be; they're rich as hell. It's the smaller operators who are selling our souls for us.
Fox TV is indeed tabloid GOP-TV.
CNN, and all the others you list, are moderate to conservative entities, if they can be characterized at all. Besides, "liberalism" is defined as open-mindedness, fairness, and the ability to see all sides of a story. Any TV network should be proud to be called such.
But they are not "liberal". CNN is changing its lineup to suck up to the FOX crowd. ABC, and most certainly NBC are owned by extremely conservative corporations, Disney and GE respectively. The bosses of those Republican companies are influencing hiring and firing of upper and middle level management, causing a tilt towards the right that is becoming discernible even to a casual viewer.
FOX is not in the fairness business. It follows the meme, a wrong one, that all who do not agree with their views are Liberal, and part of a Liberal powerbase that they are in biz to negate.
FOX is Murdoch's wet dream. He wants a no-apologies propoganda machine for deregulation, insulting Clinton, religion, slandering Clinton, corporate welfare kings, removing Clinton, military buildups, destroying Clinton, and destroying any damned body that gets in his way to enormous wealth and power for himself and all of his ideological stripe.
No, I'm not going to cite sources. I 'm not going to exhaust myself proving water is wet for the millionth time. And anyway, it is the hallmark of conservatism that they can NEVER be wrong, and that the other side IS. And immoral and evil and godless and...
Liberalism's hallmark, and the hallmark of good journalism as well, is the ability to see all sides of an argument, and to doubt and question deeply held beliefs. FOX fails this test, and is not a journalistic network. It is an attack vehicle for a narrow slice of American life -- angry white suburban USAian men who think that blacks have more rights than they, that all their money is being shipped overseas, that women are too damned uppity, and that their religion is the right and only one. And like lots of guns in case the Guvmint needs overthrowing, or blacks leave the cities and attack their suburban strongholds... believe me, I grew up reading the pamphets spread by milita, Birchers and similar. I'm not exaggerating.
Anyhow, to sum up: Murdoch is a right Uberwinger who created the FOX NEWS network to destroy the influence of anyone who does not support his ideology. FOX exists to demonize its opponents and slavishly promote its politicians.
"Liberals" (anyone not a Murdochian) have no such parallel network of ruthless lying attack dogs. By "Liberals" I mean the 75% of the USA that are not conservatives.
"Troll" indeed.
1. IF Goatse was found by a kid, they were probably looking for it.
2. They'd die laughing -- or never, ever go look at that site again. I doubt they'd run out and find a barnyard animal to play with.
I really do think we censor our memories.
"My child" would find erotica anyway. Magazines are everywhere; they always were. I don't see how showing the pictures on a monitor makes it so much more necessary to control the world the child sees.
We - almost ALL of us -- saw erotic imagery and videos when we were growing up. We did not die.
Children are interested in sexuality, just like sports or arts or painting. If they are so inclined, they can look at their friend's dad's porn stash under the dresser. And they always will, worlds without end, amen.
The problem with these "filters" is that they do not work. Many of the cypernanny filters are put together by organizations that can, how can we put this, have a bias against homosexuals, birth control, sexual disease information... you get the point. And that's not speculation, that is a fact. Planned Parenthood is blocked, or at least was, on some school filters in the U.S.
Who chooses the material to be blocked? Who watches the watchers?
Well, do what I am doing: get a Shuttle SV24 barebone aluminum mini-micro case.
It has one external 5.25" bay, one PCI slot, built-in AGP video, sound, Firewire, USB, composite video out, a drawer-mounted hard drive bay, and only weighs 6 pounds. It measures about 11" in all dimensions.
The main drawback is the CPU: you can install either a Celery or a PIII.
BUT: I understand that on or about April 1, a new version of the case is coming out. Here's hoping for AMD support!
I don't think he said the P4 is slower; he said that the fully overclocked P4, with a 1 GHz advantage, was not really all that much faster for everyday tasks than a 2000+ Athlon.
Apple may have four percent of the desktop market, but here Barlow is not thinking logically. But to be fair, few people think this out.
Apple is NOT shrinking or losing by having a four percent market share. Think about it: they sell far more PCs to far more people than they ever have. They are a raging success.
What happened here is that the number of PC owners has grown by orders of magnitude since the eighties. Wintel grew, Apple grew. Both paradigms are successful.
By its very nature, Apple cannot succeed in the corporate world. It's about flair, being original, being artistic, being different. Since most of you do work corporate office jobs, you you that anyone showing such traits are not going to make it big -- conformity in large groups is essential to avoid conflict.
Yeah, a Mac is just a PC, but the idea is what counts. Try dropping an iMac into a Wintel office. Not conforming, not goodnik.
So before Barlow goes religious, he out to think of numbers of Macs used, not the proportion of the total PC base.
After 20 years of watching the ongoing corporatization and the creation of a conservative media hegemony, I think the word "evil" applies.
.Net to own everyone's transactions. And maybe BillG doesn't care about your private life, but what about future BillGs twenty years from now, or forty? Absolute power is being channeled into boardrooms that have no government oversight of their actions. Enron shows us how intertwined the power/money brokers are with the government. They've become inseparable. And these characters are going to decide what we see and hear on the net and any other channel of info?
Bush has had a revelation from God. He believes that he has been charged with eliminating evil-doers from the planet -- not a joke --by God Himself. If you read what he says, he is on a holy war. Any formerly Commie country, except China of course, is evil. Anything that embarassed his daddy was evil. Anything Clinton did... never mind. Saudi Arabia was the source of the terrorists for the most part, but curiously our oil sources don't seem to be evil.
Barlow, on the other hand, sees a real evil: the almost absolute monopolization, coming Real Soon Now, of all news media outlets by mega-giga-corps, leading to the pasteurization of human thought on the planet. Dead real truth. Current forerunner of such: the almost complete adoration of the current president, and the complete lack of criticism of his past, his current policies, or his actual words. This is a top-down move from the highest levels of the corporations such as AOL-TW and GE and Disney. And across the country, in many city papers, editors and reporters that aren't toeing the line are being canned. Think about it: how many reporters and editors were fired for critizing Clinton? Interesting dynamic there, dontcha think?
Barlow is right, as should be obvious. We're being sewn up into a certalized corporatocracy by the day, and no one is noticing. MS will use
Listen to Barlow.
He's understating the problem, if anything else. It illustrates what he is saying: any point of view not held by the majority, such as his, are "paranoid anticorporate radical", and will be discounted, marginalized, and eventually, erased from mainstream media entirely. He is right in all he is saying, but the rather patronizing representative of the conservative majority interviewing him practically giggles at him.
The tone of the article was aloof and slightly patronizing. The quote:
"the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 agreement that banned online distribution of companies' intellectual property"
tells you which side CNET is on.
When he passes from the intellectual scene, there will be no more dissenting voices in his league left to interview. And so his observation is correct: eventually, given the arch questions in the article by the reporter, CNET and similar corporate-owned outlets will not interview such "flakes" as he. His (accurate) observations will no longer be part of public discussion, and one tone, one philosophy will prevail: corporate absolutism, with one or two conservative behemoths owning all the news media that matter.
Unless, as per the court decision this week, a major conglomerate like AOL can slowly buy up all the music labels and telecom companies, then refuse permission to trade digital files via their Omni-Network without prior authentification vis-a-vis copyrights.
God I hope not.
Acid rain has no noticable effect on tree growth [Figure 98]
Even if so, so what? It kills lakes, reducing them to algae ponds. Depends on what he wants to look at, doesn't it?
Smoke, lead, SO2, ozone, NO2, CO concentrations in the air (US and UK) decreased steadily over the last 25 years [Figures 88, 90, 92, 93, 94, 95]
And so? They are down because of decades of war fought by environmentalista against car and oil companies. If it is indeed down, let us pay homage to their unpaid labor.
What is happening is sort of a decentralized network of more-or-less in-agreement people who believe that there is a lefty environmental/liberal agenda that needs to be neutralized.
What I've observed in the last eight years or so is that such right-leaning people have learned to spike the media lemonade, by creating pundits that sound reasonable and can be trotted out in conservative publications and new shows initially, then slowly become stars of mainstream popular press.
The actual scientists and greens are slowly pushed off the spectrum as moderates become the new liberals, and the far right simply becomes conservative.
It's worked on a lot of issues. Do remember that most publishing houses and news services are now owned and operated by extremely conservative men, and that bias is making itself present in many ways. Look at Michael Moore's book, "Stupid White Men". It was yanked from distribution months ago because he would not tone down his critique of Bush, and his publisher spiked an already printed book rather than publish something that offended his political views. It's now published, but the point is, non-conservative views are disappearing quietly from TV and book and newspapers. And what is indeed left is being redefined. Fox News is "Fair and Balanced" with moderate conservatives posing as liberals while right-wing loons are the new "mainstream". Wish I had got that memo.
Point is, this book is out there, and being pushed hard, even to the point of getting flogged on Slashdot, because there are people with axes to grind making sure it influences opinion.
From what I understand, he uses statistical games and rhetoric to mash environmental issues. Very Bell Curve; I assume he's a darling on Fox and CNN and MS-NBC. Pity I don't watch them anymore.
The thing is, there is no heavily-backed anti-Lomborg to refute him. Science isn't organized that way. So this book will have an impact, not that one is needed with this admin in power.
"Now" insanity; not "no" insanity. Sigh.
Been to Mexico City lately? It's what our cities would be like if the air couldn't move the pollution away.
Yes, the air is relatively clearer. That's because environmental activists, and real scientists, fought for decades against the Lomborgs of the right, and won... sometimes.
So give those "dishonest" people the acclamation they deserve. They fought the fight no one else cared about, and won the day with sanity.
No insanity is rolling back in, slick with media smarts and tons of cash. Here we go again...
It isn't what you are doing now that is the problem. It is the precedent you set when that trail is widened and the asphalt laid down.
What happens in 10, 20, 30, 50 years to that trail?
By starting the encroachment, you start a landslide of destruction -- someday.
The world of our roads is large enough. The idea is to draw a line, and say "no more". Leave some of it in peace.
The problem is that a little damage today results in the rationalizations that turn your trails into highways and subdivisions in a few decades. Population pressure is infinite.
We have so much developed land. At some point you have to say stop.
To say the least.
He is basically saying that almost every ecologist in the world is a part of a Green Anti-Corporate Conspiracy, and that it is his sad but necessary duty to correct the record.
Please.
This hack has been thoroughly discredited long ago. The reason he is alive is the same reason Velikovsky's "World's in Flight" is still alive, Christian fundamentalist creation dogma is considered "science", the American majority believes the guvmint is hiding aliens, and that trees cause most of the world's pollution.
I'm not going to cover the science. I'll leave that to the scientists, poor bastards.
Americans believe science to be a democratic body of knowledge. It isn't. It is a method AND a body of accepted theory and knowledge. The opinion of of the majority of non-scientists is not admissible as evidence. Popularity wih libertarian corporate theory has no bearing on the science.
It isn't a "religion" with "high priests", either. People who claim such usually have a clerical collar hidden under theor clothes, somewhere, and are using the "accuse the enemy of that which you are doing" method of attack which is working so well for right-wing zealots.
Lomborg is not arguing science. He is playing rhetorical games to please anti-science, a large segment of the American population, and to shore up the position of corporations and business, who are pursuing a long-term populist project to eliminate science from political decision and replace it with industry-friendly pseudo science. It's about money, money, money. In America, they will win. Everywhere else, they look on aghast as we embrace superstition and business to the exclusion of sanity.
Lomborg pinpoints flaws in arguments on the small scale in order to rhetorically destroy the larger arguments. Problem is, his NEED TO BELIEVE OTHERWISE aside, we are performing a worldwide uncontrolled atmospheric experiment. It's in the beginning stages now, but as the population doubles every thirty years or so, and the other nations follow our industrial example, the factors involved in the experiment will grow exponentially. The trick is to stop the disasters now, while they are small, before they chaotically grow into something we can't even imagine.
I notice a lot of the argument pro-Lomborg (I do hope I am spelling the name right) is based on a, there is no word better to describe it, hatred of a made-up enemy called the Greens. No doubt communistic, liberal, and out to destroy our money.
Problem is, the Greens are a political party with their own agenda. Ecologists without political axes to grind are in vast agreement that we are changing the ecosphere. How could we not be? It's just a matter of how.
Also, ecologists, meteorologists, and other scientists who blow the danger horn are not going to get rich bucking the power base and right-wing fringes who are indeed running things now. They are taking chances and not getting rich, just to do the right thing. Their opponents, who are trying to defuse them by using any number of dirty intellectual tricks, ARE on the side of people who will give them much money. I tend to believe the people doing it for the good of all mankind rather than people who are representing themselves and their rich patrons.
As for "keeping an open mind". Scientists do this professionally. They know how. What they don't do is refute every opposing opinion. They did a lot of the argument before, when the evidence for the theories were collected. If someone comes forward to dispute it, they have an extraordinary claim, and it is their job to provide extraordinary proof. Lomborg does not do this; his exposition is directed toward non-scientists who are pre-disposed to believe for political reasons, and for people who simply don't understand the issues involved and can be swayed through rhetoric alone.
Even Jerry Pournelle, as conservative a scientist who ever was whelped, and a proponent of the Bell Curve book, was convinced a few years ago, after reading the accumulated science, that we are conducting a massive uncontrolled experiment on the Earth's atmosphere. If HE, after all those years of asking for evidence, was convinced it is happening, I am frightened.
As for "Greens" not having "evidence", I can only say that after fifty years of study, and all the accumulated evidence presented, if a Slashdot reader says such a thing, that reader is in no mood to ever be convinced. It is hopeless. They accuse others of ideological bias, but they are convinced that no evidence can prove the other side's case. Right-wing corporate mindset is the only thing I can call it; there is no real term for this ideology. No evidence will ever work, no study will ever be complete, and the end result is that in the face of a half century of science and the consensus of the world's scientists, the laws governing pollution will be overturned. The rest of the world will slowly change their laws as well, in a rolling ideological tidal wave, resulting a REAL pollution experiment that will change the world.
Here I am, a rather indifferent assembler of PC's, but I have to think: these problems sound the problems I used to have when my box overheated.
You have the latest and greatest everything with 400+ ps's... lots of heat there. Mayhap something simple, like say, a spot on the mobo is heating more than others, and causing these problems.
In the olden days (3 years ago) I'd have taken the cover off the box, and directed a commerical box fan on the assembly. But that can't work anymore -- the air must circulate just so...
Well, I can listen and learn. No dragon boards for my next box.
Um, no, Napster did not trade materials, never copied anything, never sent any materials to anyone, and did not know if any of the material, particularly, was copyrighted.
Napster was an index of file names and locations. That's all.
The judge in that case was a dedicated champion of intellectual property laws, even if she had to create some for them to violate. She made a spectacular fool of herself by showing ignorance of the technology and personal animosity towards the defendants.
And the damage she created spreads outwards, like a tsunamic shock wave.
Being sterilized by radiation cannot mutate the flies. And furthermore, if they are sterilized, they can't procreate, so they aren't going to hurt much.
Sucks to be them, though.
Like reading Slashdot?
- Hackers don't kick your door in.
- Hackers don't publicize your name as a "suspect", thus destroying your reputation.
- Hackers don't pauperize you with legal costs.
- Hackers aren't prosecutors concerned with obtaining as many convictions as possible.
- Hackers cannot put you in prison.
- Hackers cannot shoot you dead if you try to get away.
- Hackers don't joke about your future rape schedule in their prison.
- Hackers can't hold you indefinitely in an undisclosed location without counsel or contact.
- Hackers can be a nuissance, but they rarely destroy your life.
- Hackers aren't your government.
There were no "secrets' to the atomic bomb. The physics were well understood in the thirties. The mechanism to ignite fission was pure engineering. The only thing remotely secret was the method to refine the uranium, which was solved three ways. But any decent engineer could have come up with a solution.
The design of the H-bomb was also pretty straightforward. Fission ignites dueterium/tritium, bomb goes boom.
For fifty five years, the myth of the Secrets has been bandied around. Hell, a few years ago, some poor schmuch at Los Alamos was put into solitary for revealing "secrets" of our nuclear research, and also for being suspiciously Chinese-American. It was a complete crock. There were no secrets, he wasn't a spy, and it was all politically motivated, pretty much as it was in the Fifties.
Cisco: an example of why corporations should not have the rights of humans.
They have no morals.
Seriously, they sealed a billion people behind a wall. This is... is... sick. There should be no payment sufficient to build such a filthy thing. It's like building the Berlin wall in the '40's, or creating well-designed torture chambers for some hellish country's prison. What greed!!
It's enough to make ya turn communist, I swear.
Bandwidth limitations: artificial, and should never have happened. But now that the content providers are becoming the bandwidth providers, we won't get bandwidth to burn anymore. Though 802.11 networks might give us the capability sometime, since they are constrained by neither profit nor control.
Hybrid Napster/Gnutellas: now legally impossible in the U.S., and shortly everywhere else in the world. Any volunteer index node owners would be in a world of legal pain, with their homes and future threatened. So sadly, not an option.