Solar output is stable, at least over the modern era, and there is no connection between it and "the Pause" (that would actually be a crackpot theory). Long term shifts in Earth's climate have historically been the product of either volcanism or changes in Earth's orbit.
As for the "Pause", do you see how those lines in the graph you showed don't always match up? And yet they exhibit a high degree of correlation. Funny about that. Also, and I know that this has been explained to you, because it's explained to anyone that mentions it, "the Pause" is an artifact of picking what is now the fourth warmest year on record as your baseline. Picking any other baseline would show warming, and even with the cherry-picking, the hiatus in warming ended in 2013. Also note that 14/15 of the warmest years on record are since 2000 and that we haven't had a candidate for a coldest year on record in the last century: the 'new normal' is considerably warmer.
The idea that no one understands feedback mechanisms is as absurd as saying no one understands evolution. For an introduction to the topic, see chapter 8 of the IPCC Report[pdf]. It is admittedly pretty dense, but only 23 pages.
Do note that any further reference to a 19-year pause will not merit any response: lying with statistics is still lying, and if you don't understand why picking an extreme outlier as a baseline is dishonest then it's not worth my time explaining anything.
There is a minimum level of warming given by the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, and then the feedback loops, which are likely to be strongly positive. Predictions are something like four degrees C per doubling plus or minus 1.5, which is a big range, but still not particularly comfortable for many parts of the world even on the low end. If there were no feedbacks to worry about we could probably increase CO2 at least to the end of the fossil fuel reserves.
The Sun is heating up on a giga-annum timeframe. On human-level timeframes it varies by about.1% peak-to-peak. Do you care to give that one another go?
You keep harping on about models as if they were relevant to the theory. The atmosphere is opaque to IR to the edge of the CO2-rich layer. Raising the partial pressure of CO2 pushes the CO2-rich layer further out into space, which means the IR takes longer to reach space, which makes the Earth as a whole retain heat. Whatever happens in the lower atmosphere isn't going to change the radiative physics. The H2O feedback can be presumed to be strongly positive due to its efficacy as a greenhouse gas, its abundance on the globe, and that its solubility in air rises exponentially with temperature. It would be nice if cloud formation provided enough of an albedo difference to offset this, but this possibility has been more or less disproven. Complexities about these interactions give much uncertainty to the degree of warming, but not whether the warming will happen.
Your only two options for preventing warming are raising albedo and finding a new way to radiate energy. You can waffle about models and how and when and to what degree the Earth will warm, but the warming is simple fact, and whether the models are accurate or inaccurate is a secondary concern at best.
That sound an awful lot like a religious argument. "You can't disprove the existance of God!"
It may indeed sound like the ring of certainty, while your argument may be characterized as not having examined the evidence.
The models are one thing.
The models are the science
That is bizarrely and categorically false -- like suggesting that orbital mechanics is defined by Kerbal Space Program, or that virology is defined by a particular virological model. Where do you imagine these models come from, curve fitting temperature data sets?
The fundamentals of AGW can be proven in your basement, and rely on undergraduate-level atmospheric and radiative physics. Physical laws will allow you to directly calculate the forcing from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 (TOA, assume linear lapse rate). Water and carbon dioxide are within the reach of the most modest scientific budgets, and would easily allow you to test the H2O feedback effect as well. The theory can be further confirmed by observing rising global temperatures, and the models are an attempt to predict possible outcomes.
If you'll allow me a little flexibility in speaking, AGW depends only on the properties of CO2 gas; it is proven insofar as the Stefan-Boltzmann law is proven. As I have mentioned, the history of the last hundred-odd years has been trying to disprove this relationship. The problem is that the physics is very simple: there's just not all that many places for the energy to go. If there were some feedback effect which increased albedo in proportion to the climate forcing, that would do it, or if we could discover a new way that heat is transferred to space, but otherwise warming is (unfortunately) as sure as sunrise.
The models are one thing. Even the temperature record is not necessarily critical to the theory. For AGW to be conclusively disproven, there would have to be at least one of the following discoveries: [a] a new way for large amounts of heat to be transferred to space, or [b] a feedback loop that cancels out the (strongly positive) H2O-CO2 forcing.
Both of these ideas have issues. The first one is almost too fanciful to even mention, but suffice to say we would expect to see this effect in extraterrestrial atmospheres as well. The second hypothetical has seen some investigation and was a favorite of anti-AGW researchers for a while, but so far all proposed mechanisms fall seriously short of negating the known positive feedbacks. It's not enough to say "the data sucks" or "the models suck", you need to have some sort of replacement hypothesis which explains why, all else being equal, an increase in atmospheric carbon does not lead to increased temperatures. We've eliminated a lot of false candidates over the last 100 years, and if there is some sort of force that would prevent a carbon catastrophe, we could sure use one now. It's pretty slim pickings at this point though.
As i understood it, the primary reason for classifying Pluto as a "dwarf planet" was size.
Actually no, the size criterion was whether it's big enough to be round. Pluto and Ceres, and a number of TNOs all qualify. However, Pluto is gravitationally dominated by Neptune, in a 3:2 orbital resonance. The rule is, if some other planet's gravity makes you its bitch, you don't get to be a planet.
For a more precise definition of what it means to be a planet, including several criteria for what "clearing the neighborhood" means, you can consult this arXiv paper[pdf]. Interestingly, it suggests that the size criterion may be superfluous; anything large enough to clear its orbit should be big enough to be round.
Sure. That was a sardonic jab, followed by a humorous and equally nonsensical definition of "clearing the neighborhood", followed by a scientific paper precisely defining what "clearing the neighborhood" means. If you don't think putting painted tarps over homeless people is funny, you must not live in Portland.
I'm not sure how you're reading any sort of emotional excursions here; maybe your sense of humor needs recalibration. Although I should probably have written petaliter in the title instead. Economies of scale and whatnot.
You've failed to understand the definition, or read the arXiv article I linked, or even look at the graph. Well done -- batting 1000. Those objects would only be relevant if they were gravitationally dominant. This really isn't that hard of a concept if you're not ideologically motivated against it.
And do you have any more fascinating-yet-pointless semantic arguments to make? Personally, I define "clearing the neighborhood" as "putting painted tarps over the homeless people" but for some reason that's not the definition the IAU used. However, if you'd like a more precise definition (or set of definitions), you can consult this paper. This graph is also relevant.
Well then get a broom and get out there. You have the whole solar system to do! Quick, or we won't have any planets at all!
Or you could, you know, accept that there's always going to be some degree of crap in Lagrange points. They're still under the gravitational control of the larger orbiting body, which was kinda the point: we're only counting the big things that go around the sun, not the big things that go around the sun but have weird gravitational relationships with other bodies.
Pluto and various other plutinos are in orbital resonance with Neptune, which is the dominant gravitational body in Pluto's orbital band. Yes, there are fewer objects in the Solar System which are gravitationally dominant in their orbits, but it's not an arbitrary criterion, even if it has the effect of excluding many small solar objects. "Dwarf planet" does in fact refer to, well, dwarf planets: objects of the appropriate size, orbiting the sun, which have not cleared their orbit. Objects smaller than that are usually referred to as asteroids or "small solar bodies". And as for your nitpick about barycenters, that's a semantic argument: it's just as valid (if not more so) to say that Jupiter and the Sun orbit each other.
Thank you for a collection of dressed-up semantic arguments. Next you'll tell me that white is black if you squint hard enough. As part of human-normal experiences go, red will not ever suddenly decide to change its spectrum, Earth's gravitational pull will not suddenly cease to exist, and special relativity will continue to be a thing. Which is to say, all future theories must predict all current and historical measurements, and what we've measured so far rules out most futuristic fantasy worlds and omnipotent aliens.
We know that these theories are valid over a certain domain to an extreme degree of accuracy. Are you disputing those measurements? Are you skeptical of empiricism itself? No, I maintain that you have no idea of what you're even suggesting.
The difference between Newtonian physics and relativity is an exceedingly fine one; over the domain Newton observed it does not exist. Nothing will ever overturn Newton's theories in that sense. Similarly, Einstein's theories are empirical fact and will not stop being an accurate description of the geometry of the universe (over the scale to which it applies, i.e. just about everything) in any day of the future. That geometry tells us that things like antigravity and FTL are barely even expressible, and completely impossible even if there were some sensible reason to want them to exist. That will not stop being true at any day in the future. See also: thermodynamics.
You are not being skeptical. You are being stupid. If you were skeptical, the proper attitude would be to not believe in Star Wars without evidence. Having some idea what it is you're arguing about would be good too -- just because we don't know everything does not mean we know nothing, or that anything is possible.
Most parts of relativity have been verified down to a stupefying level of precision. It is an accurate description of the universe from the cosmic scale to the atomic scale. You're proposing that there are unicorns somewhere past there. It may even be true, but science has put some hefty constraints on what kind of unicorns may exist. Also, breaking the laws of physics to allow for your preferred fantasy scenario tends to have serious negative consequences. For example, if FTL travel or information transmission exist, then you have to give up the idea of causality, since it would be trivial to arrange for events to precede their causes. Nonlocal quantum effects are bad enough, thank you.
It does not take Nostradamus to understand that gravity will still exist in the future. You seem to think that's up for debate.
Scientists have already figured out how to transmit information via quantum entanglement. Is it really so hard to believe that in another few hundred years that could maybe be developed into a transporter?
Yes. You clearly worship at the altar of Science but have no idea what it is. We can expect many things in the future but wholesale violations of relativity is not one of them. On a quantum scale some effects do not obey the principle of locality, but this effect cannot be used to transmit information, and even if it could there's nothing to suggest that the transference of quantum state has anything to do with physically moving anything anywhere.
No matter what happens in any arbitrarily long span of scientific development, red will not become blue, down will not become up, and neither (classical) information nor human craft will exceed the speed of light. To believe otherwise is to believe not in science but in fairy stories.
In short, "supporting empirical evidence" and "empirical evidence" are explicitly not the same thing
No one will ever directly perceive dark matter, or any other subatomic phenomenon. You have a made-up standard of evidence. I agree that StartsWithABang is a poor excuse for a pop sci outlet, but it works well enough for a quick rebuttal. Dark matter is at least as real as black holes, which have never been directly detected either. If we must say either "dark matter exists" or "dark matter does not exist" the first one is more correct. I am not particularly interested in semantic arguments or arguments about standards of evidence, especially as I'm quite sure you don't have the background necessary.
The competing hypotheses (MOND, MACHOs) were disproven. There's nothing else that would remotely fit in with other observations of the universe (chiefly Relativity). If you're secretly harboring a misguided grudge against Einstein you have more options, but if you're willing to discard one of the most well-verified theories in the history of science, why even bother pretending to be empirical? Just say "God did it" and be done.
If you're arguing for what the Founders intended we should have, you should be arguing to disband the military as well.
Yes, in general I would agree with that.
Well, that's at least logically consistent, and I agree that it would reduce the "adventuring" that our leaders seem to do.
How is Bashar Al-Assad doing at crushing the rebels in Syria? How well did the US military do in Vietnam? How well did the USSR do against Afghanistan?
Yes, I'm aware that all had or have some outside help, but they are still massively outgunned. What they have is numbers and generally at least some local support of the people.
That was rather the point, in Vietnam and Afghanistan the "weaker" side had a large and powerful nation-state assisting it. Most other times the result is simply massacre. The Nazis had resistance groups spring up everywhere they went, and in the vast majority of cases these groups accomplished nothing -- certainly they had no strategic effect. David versus Goliath makes a lovely story but I completely disagree that it is a principle on which to found a national defense.
As lgw said, no one has a settled idea of what dark matter is or where it comes from. We have detected that it exists and have a few constraints on what its properties must be, but there is no "theory of dark matter" per se.
Look at how long it took to go from Ben Franklin's experiments with lightning to the theory and detection of the electron. Or from Newton's work on optics to the photon. The twentieth century advanced our knowledge of physics phenomenally, so that now we are left with studying phenomenae that are very very hard to perceive: Higgs bosons, gravitational waves, and dark matter/energy. I don't know why precisely you would expect results from these experiments in any sort of short time frame when the phenomenae in question are most notable at the galactic scale. And frankly, you're very foolish to dismiss the concept without having some understanding of the evidence for it.
Dark matter and dark energy have multiple independent lines of supporting empirical evidence. I presume you are willfully ignorant of this. Perhaps you can manage to keep it to yourself next time.
What military? The militia is intended to be the national defense force. That's why military appropriations have a time limit: standing armies were considered an inherent threat to liberty.
If you're arguing for what the Founders intended we should have, you should be arguing to disband the military as well. If you think that's a stupid idea, then you have a bone to pick with them and the Constitution. Personally, my studies of history have shown very few examples of successful civil resistance* against almost any armed force. It is not merely guns and willpower that make an army, it is a system of command, organization, communications, and logistics. An untrained, unorganized militia is useless as a fighting force. I believe that to defend a country, you need an army, and a couple centuries of American politicians seem to agree with me. On that basis, I believe the Second Amendment to be deeply flawed, and while it has been restricted and reinterpreted by Congress and the courts, we should probably formalize those restrictions with another amendment.
* Please do not suggest the American Revolution as an example: The colonists were armed and bankrolled by the French, who also contributed a sizable army and the world's second largest navy.
I'm trying to imagine your world for a minute, where Linux is the product of a handful of neckbeards and used only by snobby masochists. It would be funnier if it weren't so sad and deluded.
Linux is usable as a desktop, and in the ideal case it is on par with other desktop OSes. However, where it really excels is in the ability to script the OS and tinker with the internals. Car analogy: if you're only ever going to drive on the highway, you don't need the off-road vehicle. If you're not going to want to get under the hood, buy something that's designed for that. Linux is the OS where setting up a web server takes a couple dozen keystrokes. Windows is the OS where you say "web server" and people get vague, confused expressions.
Microsoft has an entrenched market position; very few people use Windows because they like it. In point of fact, most people dislike it, especially because the only time that the OS draws attention to itself is when something goes wrong. And it's obvious that you have no experience with supporting Windows in the enterprise, or you wouldn't be talking about stability. It doesn't even make sense to discuss: no matter what software you have, there is some combination of factors that will break it: updates, other software, bit flips, or the endless creativity of the end user.* Fixing issues with Windows is bread and butter to millions of people.
Linux is ready for the desktop -- certainly in the enterprise environment. Linux is far more useful as a server, development platform, or HPC platform, but it can also be used as a desktop. It's probably not worth it for home use unless you think tinkering with your OS is fun. Hopefully it will never see mass-market adoption, but perhaps with the current learn-to-program initiatives it will eventually get to 5% marketshare. Trying to become Windows in an effort to gain marketshare would be throwing away the most useful parts of the OS.
* In most cases you can't even get it to tell you what's wrong; Microsoft seems to think the purpose of error messages is to hide information from the end user. Network problems? "Sorry, Windows couldn't fix your error. Try contacting someone who cares."
You've read too much vitriol and not enough information. Systemd is a good idea, and necessary, and SysV init was so completely broken that [a] almost all its intended functionality was replaced by other software, and [b] every other UNIX system had already replaced it before systemd was even conceived. The idea that you cannot track processes, or control their resource use, is indescribably braindead.
You keep on deep throating an OS where you can only upgrade to the latest edition if the manufacturer has bothered releasing drivers for it, and you have zero recourse when things fail, and we'll keep using something that is at least fixable.
I'm also going to call you out (every time) for your own personal idiocy in trying to compare a server/workstation OS to a desktop OS. If you are a programmer, you should probably be using Linux. If you are not Linux is going to be, at best, the same as any other OS, and probably worse. Linux is something that is necessary to people developing hardware and software products. It's like criticizing a HMMWV for not being a BMW. I understand in this analogy you're a car dealership and so have your own myopic perspective on what cars should be like, but this thing where you're completely impervious to the real world is getting really tiresome.
As I pointed out, the argument that government simply must be the source of rights, because only government can uphold them due to its monopoly on violence is flawed at the core. Because, taken simply one step further, military — the part of government, that does nothing but violence — must then be the source of rights.
Only insofar as they are used against the citizens. Otherwise that would be the purview of the police/justice system.
It's not that you disagree that rights are what can be enforced (either by one's self or the government), it's that you're ideologically motivated against the conclusions of that fact. That cognitive dissonance must be maddening.
You keep harping about "natural rights" as if they were some sort of fundamental, universal idea, like the value of pi. That they are central to your personal philosophy does not determine the nature of reality. In this world, rights are neither endowed nor enforced by any Creator.
The key point here is that you're taking a rational (as opposed to empirical) view of things. Rationalism is a fine thing, much of philosophy and law is based on rationalism and logic. The problem is that logical systems are frequently inconsistent, and the further you are from observable facts, the more likely you are to come to some conclusion that while logically correct bears no resemblance to reality.
In your world, rights represent some sort of absolute which humanity may or may not live up to. You could describe this as a noble ideal, or as a fantasy. Either way, it is somewhat in contradiction with the world as it is observed. It's also very dependent on the philosophical and cultural background to produce consistent answers. Usually, I don't think it's wise to try to compare rational truths with empirical ones -- it's hard to come to agreement when there is no common test of validity. That said, I heavily favor empiricism.
As for the specific topic of violence: short of death, there are few ways to take the ability to do violence from humans. Generally though exercising this right is frowned upon, and we may be said to delegate it to peacekeepers and warriors. As concerns the 2nd Amendment, frankly, the Founders should have known better than to trust in asymmetric combat to protect anyone from either a tyrannical government or foreign power. A war for independence might eventually have been winnable without aid from France, but such was not the case in 1776 and there aren't terribly many historical examples of militias overcoming world powers. The more common case is that resistance leads to massacre. However, if one is to insist on the 2nd Am. being interpreted to its fullest intent, one must also adopt the corresponding ideal of the Founders, which was that a standing army in times of peace was a threat to liberty.
Over the years, it has become established that the Founders were completely nuts in thinking that an armed citizenry would be any use against a modern military, and correspondingly the army has grown and individual rights to armament have declined. Disbanding the military in peacetime would certainly put a dent in the military industrial complex, and reduce the need for citizens to defend themselves against their government. We have peaceful relations with our neighbors and vast oceans protecting our borders. However, massive war machines and a trained warrior caste are much more effective at conducting warfare. I'm fine with either option. Picking both options is just setting yourself up for an arms race that I'm pretty sure has already been lost.
Slashdot Mirror
Solar output is stable, at least over the modern era, and there is no connection between it and "the Pause" (that would actually be a crackpot theory). Long term shifts in Earth's climate have historically been the product of either volcanism or changes in Earth's orbit.
As for the "Pause", do you see how those lines in the graph you showed don't always match up? And yet they exhibit a high degree of correlation. Funny about that. Also, and I know that this has been explained to you, because it's explained to anyone that mentions it, "the Pause" is an artifact of picking what is now the fourth warmest year on record as your baseline. Picking any other baseline would show warming, and even with the cherry-picking, the hiatus in warming ended in 2013. Also note that 14/15 of the warmest years on record are since 2000 and that we haven't had a candidate for a coldest year on record in the last century: the 'new normal' is considerably warmer.
The idea that no one understands feedback mechanisms is as absurd as saying no one understands evolution. For an introduction to the topic, see chapter 8 of the IPCC Report[pdf]. It is admittedly pretty dense, but only 23 pages.
Do note that any further reference to a 19-year pause will not merit any response: lying with statistics is still lying, and if you don't understand why picking an extreme outlier as a baseline is dishonest then it's not worth my time explaining anything.
There is a minimum level of warming given by the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, and then the feedback loops, which are likely to be strongly positive. Predictions are something like four degrees C per doubling plus or minus 1.5, which is a big range, but still not particularly comfortable for many parts of the world even on the low end. If there were no feedbacks to worry about we could probably increase CO2 at least to the end of the fossil fuel reserves.
The Sun is heating up on a giga-annum timeframe. On human-level timeframes it varies by about .1% peak-to-peak. Do you care to give that one another go?
You keep harping on about models as if they were relevant to the theory. The atmosphere is opaque to IR to the edge of the CO2-rich layer. Raising the partial pressure of CO2 pushes the CO2-rich layer further out into space, which means the IR takes longer to reach space, which makes the Earth as a whole retain heat. Whatever happens in the lower atmosphere isn't going to change the radiative physics. The H2O feedback can be presumed to be strongly positive due to its efficacy as a greenhouse gas, its abundance on the globe, and that its solubility in air rises exponentially with temperature. It would be nice if cloud formation provided enough of an albedo difference to offset this, but this possibility has been more or less disproven. Complexities about these interactions give much uncertainty to the degree of warming, but not whether the warming will happen.
Your only two options for preventing warming are raising albedo and finding a new way to radiate energy. You can waffle about models and how and when and to what degree the Earth will warm, but the warming is simple fact, and whether the models are accurate or inaccurate is a secondary concern at best.
For AGW to be conclusively disproven,
That sound an awful lot like a religious argument. "You can't disprove the existance of God!"
It may indeed sound like the ring of certainty, while your argument may be characterized as not having examined the evidence.
The models are one thing.
The models are the science
That is bizarrely and categorically false -- like suggesting that orbital mechanics is defined by Kerbal Space Program, or that virology is defined by a particular virological model. Where do you imagine these models come from, curve fitting temperature data sets?
The fundamentals of AGW can be proven in your basement, and rely on undergraduate-level atmospheric and radiative physics. Physical laws will allow you to directly calculate the forcing from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 (TOA, assume linear lapse rate). Water and carbon dioxide are within the reach of the most modest scientific budgets, and would easily allow you to test the H2O feedback effect as well. The theory can be further confirmed by observing rising global temperatures, and the models are an attempt to predict possible outcomes.
If you'll allow me a little flexibility in speaking, AGW depends only on the properties of CO2 gas; it is proven insofar as the Stefan-Boltzmann law is proven. As I have mentioned, the history of the last hundred-odd years has been trying to disprove this relationship. The problem is that the physics is very simple: there's just not all that many places for the energy to go. If there were some feedback effect which increased albedo in proportion to the climate forcing, that would do it, or if we could discover a new way that heat is transferred to space, but otherwise warming is (unfortunately) as sure as sunrise.
The models are one thing. Even the temperature record is not necessarily critical to the theory. For AGW to be conclusively disproven, there would have to be at least one of the following discoveries: [a] a new way for large amounts of heat to be transferred to space, or [b] a feedback loop that cancels out the (strongly positive) H2O-CO2 forcing.
Both of these ideas have issues. The first one is almost too fanciful to even mention, but suffice to say we would expect to see this effect in extraterrestrial atmospheres as well. The second hypothetical has seen some investigation and was a favorite of anti-AGW researchers for a while, but so far all proposed mechanisms fall seriously short of negating the known positive feedbacks. It's not enough to say "the data sucks" or "the models suck", you need to have some sort of replacement hypothesis which explains why, all else being equal, an increase in atmospheric carbon does not lead to increased temperatures. We've eliminated a lot of false candidates over the last 100 years, and if there is some sort of force that would prevent a carbon catastrophe, we could sure use one now. It's pretty slim pickings at this point though.
As i understood it, the primary reason for classifying Pluto as a "dwarf planet" was size.
Actually no, the size criterion was whether it's big enough to be round. Pluto and Ceres, and a number of TNOs all qualify. However, Pluto is gravitationally dominated by Neptune, in a 3:2 orbital resonance. The rule is, if some other planet's gravity makes you its bitch, you don't get to be a planet.
For a more precise definition of what it means to be a planet, including several criteria for what "clearing the neighborhood" means, you can consult this arXiv paper[pdf]. Interestingly, it suggests that the size criterion may be superfluous; anything large enough to clear its orbit should be big enough to be round.
Sure. That was a sardonic jab, followed by a humorous and equally nonsensical definition of "clearing the neighborhood", followed by a scientific paper precisely defining what "clearing the neighborhood" means. If you don't think putting painted tarps over homeless people is funny, you must not live in Portland.
I'm not sure how you're reading any sort of emotional excursions here; maybe your sense of humor needs recalibration. Although I should probably have written petaliter in the title instead. Economies of scale and whatnot.
You've failed to understand the definition, or read the arXiv article I linked, or even look at the graph. Well done -- batting 1000. Those objects would only be relevant if they were gravitationally dominant. This really isn't that hard of a concept if you're not ideologically motivated against it.
And do you have any more fascinating-yet-pointless semantic arguments to make? Personally, I define "clearing the neighborhood" as "putting painted tarps over the homeless people" but for some reason that's not the definition the IAU used. However, if you'd like a more precise definition (or set of definitions), you can consult this paper. This graph is also relevant.
Well then get a broom and get out there. You have the whole solar system to do! Quick, or we won't have any planets at all!
Or you could, you know, accept that there's always going to be some degree of crap in Lagrange points. They're still under the gravitational control of the larger orbiting body, which was kinda the point: we're only counting the big things that go around the sun, not the big things that go around the sun but have weird gravitational relationships with other bodies.
Pluto and various other plutinos are in orbital resonance with Neptune, which is the dominant gravitational body in Pluto's orbital band. Yes, there are fewer objects in the Solar System which are gravitationally dominant in their orbits, but it's not an arbitrary criterion, even if it has the effect of excluding many small solar objects. "Dwarf planet" does in fact refer to, well, dwarf planets: objects of the appropriate size, orbiting the sun, which have not cleared their orbit. Objects smaller than that are usually referred to as asteroids or "small solar bodies". And as for your nitpick about barycenters, that's a semantic argument: it's just as valid (if not more so) to say that Jupiter and the Sun orbit each other.
Thank you for a collection of dressed-up semantic arguments. Next you'll tell me that white is black if you squint hard enough. As part of human-normal experiences go, red will not ever suddenly decide to change its spectrum, Earth's gravitational pull will not suddenly cease to exist, and special relativity will continue to be a thing. Which is to say, all future theories must predict all current and historical measurements, and what we've measured so far rules out most futuristic fantasy worlds and omnipotent aliens.
We know that these theories are valid over a certain domain to an extreme degree of accuracy. Are you disputing those measurements? Are you skeptical of empiricism itself? No, I maintain that you have no idea of what you're even suggesting.
The difference between Newtonian physics and relativity is an exceedingly fine one; over the domain Newton observed it does not exist. Nothing will ever overturn Newton's theories in that sense. Similarly, Einstein's theories are empirical fact and will not stop being an accurate description of the geometry of the universe (over the scale to which it applies, i.e. just about everything) in any day of the future. That geometry tells us that things like antigravity and FTL are barely even expressible, and completely impossible even if there were some sensible reason to want them to exist. That will not stop being true at any day in the future. See also: thermodynamics.
You are not being skeptical. You are being stupid. If you were skeptical, the proper attitude would be to not believe in Star Wars without evidence. Having some idea what it is you're arguing about would be good too -- just because we don't know everything does not mean we know nothing, or that anything is possible.
Most parts of relativity have been verified down to a stupefying level of precision. It is an accurate description of the universe from the cosmic scale to the atomic scale. You're proposing that there are unicorns somewhere past there. It may even be true, but science has put some hefty constraints on what kind of unicorns may exist. Also, breaking the laws of physics to allow for your preferred fantasy scenario tends to have serious negative consequences. For example, if FTL travel or information transmission exist, then you have to give up the idea of causality, since it would be trivial to arrange for events to precede their causes. Nonlocal quantum effects are bad enough, thank you.
It does not take Nostradamus to understand that gravity will still exist in the future. You seem to think that's up for debate.
Scientists have already figured out how to transmit information via quantum entanglement. Is it really so hard to believe that in another few hundred years that could maybe be developed into a transporter?
Yes. You clearly worship at the altar of Science but have no idea what it is. We can expect many things in the future but wholesale violations of relativity is not one of them. On a quantum scale some effects do not obey the principle of locality, but this effect cannot be used to transmit information, and even if it could there's nothing to suggest that the transference of quantum state has anything to do with physically moving anything anywhere.
No matter what happens in any arbitrarily long span of scientific development, red will not become blue, down will not become up, and neither (classical) information nor human craft will exceed the speed of light. To believe otherwise is to believe not in science but in fairy stories.
In short, "supporting empirical evidence" and "empirical evidence" are explicitly not the same thing
No one will ever directly perceive dark matter, or any other subatomic phenomenon. You have a made-up standard of evidence. I agree that StartsWithABang is a poor excuse for a pop sci outlet, but it works well enough for a quick rebuttal. Dark matter is at least as real as black holes, which have never been directly detected either. If we must say either "dark matter exists" or "dark matter does not exist" the first one is more correct. I am not particularly interested in semantic arguments or arguments about standards of evidence, especially as I'm quite sure you don't have the background necessary.
Sorry about your hypothetical couch.
The competing hypotheses (MOND, MACHOs) were disproven. There's nothing else that would remotely fit in with other observations of the universe (chiefly Relativity). If you're secretly harboring a misguided grudge against Einstein you have more options, but if you're willing to discard one of the most well-verified theories in the history of science, why even bother pretending to be empirical? Just say "God did it" and be done.
If you're arguing for what the Founders intended we should have, you should be arguing to disband the military as well.
Yes, in general I would agree with that.
Well, that's at least logically consistent, and I agree that it would reduce the "adventuring" that our leaders seem to do.
How is Bashar Al-Assad doing at crushing the rebels in Syria? How well did the US military do in Vietnam? How well did the USSR do against Afghanistan?
Yes, I'm aware that all had or have some outside help, but they are still massively outgunned. What they have is numbers and generally at least some local support of the people.
That was rather the point, in Vietnam and Afghanistan the "weaker" side had a large and powerful nation-state assisting it. Most other times the result is simply massacre. The Nazis had resistance groups spring up everywhere they went, and in the vast majority of cases these groups accomplished nothing -- certainly they had no strategic effect. David versus Goliath makes a lovely story but I completely disagree that it is a principle on which to found a national defense.
As lgw said, no one has a settled idea of what dark matter is or where it comes from. We have detected that it exists and have a few constraints on what its properties must be, but there is no "theory of dark matter" per se.
Look at how long it took to go from Ben Franklin's experiments with lightning to the theory and detection of the electron. Or from Newton's work on optics to the photon. The twentieth century advanced our knowledge of physics phenomenally, so that now we are left with studying phenomenae that are very very hard to perceive: Higgs bosons, gravitational waves, and dark matter/energy. I don't know why precisely you would expect results from these experiments in any sort of short time frame when the phenomenae in question are most notable at the galactic scale. And frankly, you're very foolish to dismiss the concept without having some understanding of the evidence for it.
Dark matter and dark energy have multiple independent lines of supporting empirical evidence. I presume you are willfully ignorant of this. Perhaps you can manage to keep it to yourself next time.
What military? The militia is intended to be the national defense force. That's why military appropriations have a time limit: standing armies were considered an inherent threat to liberty.
If you're arguing for what the Founders intended we should have, you should be arguing to disband the military as well. If you think that's a stupid idea, then you have a bone to pick with them and the Constitution. Personally, my studies of history have shown very few examples of successful civil resistance* against almost any armed force. It is not merely guns and willpower that make an army, it is a system of command, organization, communications, and logistics. An untrained, unorganized militia is useless as a fighting force. I believe that to defend a country, you need an army, and a couple centuries of American politicians seem to agree with me. On that basis, I believe the Second Amendment to be deeply flawed, and while it has been restricted and reinterpreted by Congress and the courts, we should probably formalize those restrictions with another amendment.
* Please do not suggest the American Revolution as an example: The colonists were armed and bankrolled by the French, who also contributed a sizable army and the world's second largest navy.
I'm trying to imagine your world for a minute, where Linux is the product of a handful of neckbeards and used only by snobby masochists. It would be funnier if it weren't so sad and deluded.
Linux is usable as a desktop, and in the ideal case it is on par with other desktop OSes. However, where it really excels is in the ability to script the OS and tinker with the internals. Car analogy: if you're only ever going to drive on the highway, you don't need the off-road vehicle. If you're not going to want to get under the hood, buy something that's designed for that. Linux is the OS where setting up a web server takes a couple dozen keystrokes. Windows is the OS where you say "web server" and people get vague, confused expressions.
Microsoft has an entrenched market position; very few people use Windows because they like it. In point of fact, most people dislike it, especially because the only time that the OS draws attention to itself is when something goes wrong. And it's obvious that you have no experience with supporting Windows in the enterprise, or you wouldn't be talking about stability. It doesn't even make sense to discuss: no matter what software you have, there is some combination of factors that will break it: updates, other software, bit flips, or the endless creativity of the end user.* Fixing issues with Windows is bread and butter to millions of people.
Linux is ready for the desktop -- certainly in the enterprise environment. Linux is far more useful as a server, development platform, or HPC platform, but it can also be used as a desktop. It's probably not worth it for home use unless you think tinkering with your OS is fun. Hopefully it will never see mass-market adoption, but perhaps with the current learn-to-program initiatives it will eventually get to 5% marketshare. Trying to become Windows in an effort to gain marketshare would be throwing away the most useful parts of the OS.
* In most cases you can't even get it to tell you what's wrong; Microsoft seems to think the purpose of error messages is to hide information from the end user. Network problems? "Sorry, Windows couldn't fix your error. Try contacting someone who cares."
You've read too much vitriol and not enough information. Systemd is a good idea, and necessary, and SysV init was so completely broken that [a] almost all its intended functionality was replaced by other software, and [b] every other UNIX system had already replaced it before systemd was even conceived. The idea that you cannot track processes, or control their resource use, is indescribably braindead.
You keep on deep throating an OS where you can only upgrade to the latest edition if the manufacturer has bothered releasing drivers for it, and you have zero recourse when things fail, and we'll keep using something that is at least fixable.
I'm also going to call you out (every time) for your own personal idiocy in trying to compare a server/workstation OS to a desktop OS. If you are a programmer, you should probably be using Linux. If you are not Linux is going to be, at best, the same as any other OS, and probably worse. Linux is something that is necessary to people developing hardware and software products. It's like criticizing a HMMWV for not being a BMW. I understand in this analogy you're a car dealership and so have your own myopic perspective on what cars should be like, but this thing where you're completely impervious to the real world is getting really tiresome.
As I pointed out, the argument that government simply must be the source of rights, because only government can uphold them due to its monopoly on violence is flawed at the core. Because, taken simply one step further, military — the part of government, that does nothing but violence — must then be the source of rights.
Only insofar as they are used against the citizens. Otherwise that would be the purview of the police/justice system.
It's not that you disagree that rights are what can be enforced (either by one's self or the government), it's that you're ideologically motivated against the conclusions of that fact. That cognitive dissonance must be maddening.
You keep harping about "natural rights" as if they were some sort of fundamental, universal idea, like the value of pi. That they are central to your personal philosophy does not determine the nature of reality. In this world, rights are neither endowed nor enforced by any Creator.
The key point here is that you're taking a rational (as opposed to empirical) view of things. Rationalism is a fine thing, much of philosophy and law is based on rationalism and logic. The problem is that logical systems are frequently inconsistent, and the further you are from observable facts, the more likely you are to come to some conclusion that while logically correct bears no resemblance to reality.
In your world, rights represent some sort of absolute which humanity may or may not live up to. You could describe this as a noble ideal, or as a fantasy. Either way, it is somewhat in contradiction with the world as it is observed. It's also very dependent on the philosophical and cultural background to produce consistent answers. Usually, I don't think it's wise to try to compare rational truths with empirical ones -- it's hard to come to agreement when there is no common test of validity. That said, I heavily favor empiricism.
As for the specific topic of violence: short of death, there are few ways to take the ability to do violence from humans. Generally though exercising this right is frowned upon, and we may be said to delegate it to peacekeepers and warriors. As concerns the 2nd Amendment, frankly, the Founders should have known better than to trust in asymmetric combat to protect anyone from either a tyrannical government or foreign power. A war for independence might eventually have been winnable without aid from France, but such was not the case in 1776 and there aren't terribly many historical examples of militias overcoming world powers. The more common case is that resistance leads to massacre. However, if one is to insist on the 2nd Am. being interpreted to its fullest intent, one must also adopt the corresponding ideal of the Founders, which was that a standing army in times of peace was a threat to liberty.
Over the years, it has become established that the Founders were completely nuts in thinking that an armed citizenry would be any use against a modern military, and correspondingly the army has grown and individual rights to armament have declined. Disbanding the military in peacetime would certainly put a dent in the military industrial complex, and reduce the need for citizens to defend themselves against their government. We have peaceful relations with our neighbors and vast oceans protecting our borders. However, massive war machines and a trained warrior caste are much more effective at conducting warfare. I'm fine with either option. Picking both options is just setting yourself up for an arms race that I'm pretty sure has already been lost.