Yeah there's no sense in the law that someone can become so financially disenfranchised that their freedom of speech has effectively been taken away. People have this sense that somehow that can be the case. I have that sense myself. People can be so downtrodden or in theory denied access to the stuff that makes meaningful participation possible at all that they've been made citizens with fewer rights.
However true it may be in real life, it's too complicated for the law to directly define and address. The way to deal with this if you think it's a problem is indirectly.. by working to make sure society maintains some basic level of equity amongst its citizens irrespective of relative wealth. For a lot of people inequity is like porn- you know it when you see it, but not everyone shares the same definition.
Yeah we're not disagreeing that much . Of course consumers have to pay for stuff... I am a big defender (around these parts LOL) of recognizing that people need to get paid to produce work and cable companies are no different.
My concern is with the fact that this guy is the head of FCC and seems massively disinterested and out of touch with what's going on in the land - air duopoly (comcast- verizon) . Your general point is that it costs money to run stuff -hey that's the same point I am always trying to make around here. ! It costs money to run stuff and it costs money to invest in infrastructure so you can run stuff. That money has to come from somewhere, but without a truly competitive market in place where there are low barriers to entry and consumers can switch their choices frictionlessly , we need oversight.
The advantages of fibre optic over electrical lines is just exactly that you don't have to push electrons across a wire to transmit information. In general, increasing bandwidth over an electrical connection requires more power. Carrying terabits over fiber optic networks requires phenomenally less power and the power is not proportional to the number of bytes that fiber optic is carrying.
Any increase in power that comes from keeping the equipment optical going - lasers, tranducers and modulators - is minimal enough compared to the HUGE increase in bandwidth to effectively break the connection between bytes sent and running electrical costs.
.
It's not enough to point to a distant law of physics when you're arguing about real world economics.
The point I am trying to make is twofold. One is as a business, the concern fo ISPs is to maximize profits. The best way to do that is to charge more for doing nothing, or repressing competition, which is what they're always looking to do.
That's why we need something outside of business to look after the interest of people . Something with enough collective power that it can control those real world entities who would advantage themselves, or Hisself in the case of a King, at everyone else's expense. The idea we came up with a couple hundred years ago was called "government" by for and of the people.
Utilities are regulated for just this reason. People NEED the internet as much as they NEED electricity. It's now a fundamental necessity for modern life. If you don't pay your electricity bill, the lights go off, but that's not the same as saying the electrical companies are deregulated. Enron was deregulated electricity. That's when they started doing shit like turning off generators to drive up prices. This is what businesses will do given the chance. Sorry.
The point of my post is to say that these ISPs need to be regulated and watchdogged and minimal price / performance standards set by an entity outside of themselves.
That's how modernity works. anything else is a form of despotism either by Kings or businesses, whoever gets enough power to screw everyone else over.
It's not morally wrong, it's temporarily technically and socially not possible. That's just a reality of today's world. I am not anxious to spend time money and resources on defeating this ubiquitous fact. In the future, something either the product or the business model or whatever will change and all will be well again. When will that be?...mmmm some of us are trying to make the future happen ;
No shit. SNARK ATTACK-->Why can't they tell everyone what they're doing and how it's going and where its weaknesses are! We deserve to know! We paid for it!
Its amazing to me how many people are so paranoid about their pirated shit that they FEAR the FBI doing what it's supposed to do because it might be turned against their pirate p0rn collection and Jay Zee rips.
I have a solution. Stop prosecuting people for ripping shit and tell the makers of digital shit to figure out another business model but don't look to law enforcement to prop them up. No more law enforcement resources or court resources dedicated to prosecuting RIAA suits and such like. Just fucking deal with it.
If a terrorists plot gets through do we really want it to be partially because they had the accidental cooperation of people who were trying to sneak Game Of Thrones around online?
We need a clear separation in mandates between the FBI et al using advanced technology to capture real threats and pirating teenagers and the parents who love them.
We just can't care about that shit and we have to make it known the FBI et al are not going to be interested in that shit so people don't have this anti-law enforcement attitude on account of they themselves being technically engaged in some stupid low level criminal activity.
This is not a popular position to take around these parts, but I have made the same point myself. We all know the ugly side of corporations and this is the ugly side of consumers- they want shit without paying anything for it. In some markets - the academic journal market springs to mind- the price is unjustifiable to the point of being ludacris. But look at so called beggarware where the software author asks people to donate whatever they can to keep it going and makes it available for free. In this instance people pay.... nothing.. I just read yesterday a blog where the guy was complaining that people are using it but not paying anything at all.
The book Freakanomics went over a case something like the beggarware involving bagels and it turns out if other people see whether or not you paid, nearly everyone pays. Otherwise, nearly no one pays.. it was in the single digits.
Is this a thing culture can overcome? Obviously the impulse to get free stuff is genetically based, but so are a lot of bad impulses.
Further the new boss through itâ(TM)s surrogates like Electronic Frontier Foundation seems to be waging a cynical PR campaign that equates the unauthorized use of other peopleâ(TM)s property (artistâ(TM)s songs) with freedom. A sort of Cyber â"Bolshevik campaign of mass collectivization for the good of the stateâ¦er.. I mean Internet. I say cynical because when it comes to their intellectual property, software patents for instance, these same companies fight tooth and nail.
Let me get this straight EFF is a surrogate for Apple and Google is making money off your music? By illegal downloading?
Your problem isn't any of the players you're citing. It's that computers are gigantic copy machines that make perfect copies. That's what all this is about. The new business models that can leverage this new fact about reality aren't here as far as I know. They will come in time. It's a new thing , this gigantic distributed copy machine, and some people are going to get screwed.
FWIW I would buy an album I liked directly from the artist for 5.99 US dollars. More than that and I am either looking for a used copy (for less than 5.99 or just waiting until such becomes available and listening to / reading something else until then.
I think with no real evidence there are a lot of people like me.
Anyways EFF is your friend and Goggle is your friend. Your missive is a study in how many different (really different) ways people can slice and dice innocent parts of reality into a conspiracy theory so long as no evidence is required to support said conspiracy.
The idea that you can just move between states or even between jobs in the same town because you're dissatisfied with some aspect of your town or state is a myth that a lot of libertarian thought is predicated on.
It's incredibly hard to change jobs. After a few changes, what does your resume look like? Job hopper, that's what. The soft power that actually control people's lives are never taken into account or just wished away in all these kinds of schemes.
Under the covers, it's the same argument that laws are costless self enforcing entities. You say X will happen and then you go to make it happen and you find out what the resistance to it is and the net effect is it just can't happen for reasons which are not obvious apriori on paper.
We live and spend our years and die in the real world as it really is. It's not really possible to move to another state, then another after that one pisses you off and then another. You lose money friends local connections a sense of place and rootedness for your kids and other intangibles every time you move.
Maybe if you 're willing to work at ANY McDonalds ANYWHERE and be single your entire life such a scheme could be implemented. But even then, wouldn't it be more practical and less a waste of your life's time and energy to just have a baseline of reasonable behavior- in labor and safety laws, in environmental issues in all the things that are just universal values and undergird your ability to live whatever kind of life you want to live enforced by the federal government?
What good is state based feudalism? The serfs never win under feudalism of any description.
Metering the net by packet is an artificial concept derived from real world things like water and gas usage where the amount of "stuff" bought is directly proportional to the cost of supplying that "stuff". It has no correlation to the overhead of of an ISP who does not mine or manufacture "stuff" and whose "pipes" do not get "worn out" the more "stuff" passes through them.
The ONLY purpose of such a law would be to keep poorer people down and in their place by denying them access to the best richest and most byte-filled stuff and limiting how much they can do online relative to their more fortunate peers.
If they can meter bytes the way they meter water they can control who sees what. Rich people see more and better things sooner. That's the ONLY purpose of schemes like this.
We have that now to a degree, but this scheme would codify it in a way it's not now codified. The vast majority people have the same per month cap imposed on them. Metering bytes would effectively cap people in direct proportion to their wealth. Sure , rich people can afford to buy as many capped monthly accounts as they want (say) but that just describes the problem- rich people have unfair access to more and privileged information, not a state of affairs we want to codify.
This guy is acting as a stalking horse to this long wished for wet dream on the part of the telcoms and cable companies. Rest assured they're watching to see what the reactions will be. Be sure to register your reaction.
Rest assured also that this sub-human gutter animal will position himself to profit enormously should such a byte regime ever come down.
It's long past time to pay for universal and near -as-you-can-get-all-you-can-eat internet access with taxes. This is what they're really terrified of- Muni WiFi.
Taxes paid for he development of the internet and the only legislation and regulation I want to see on it is
1) network neutrality- no bidding wars between content providers for access to the internet and
2) mandated bandwidth / total megabyte allowances going up each year at the same or better cost using South Korea and other first world nations as models with technical analysis of reasonable potential capabilities and capacity conducted by MIT as benchmarks of what can and should be possible at any given time point.
I'm ashamed to be forced to admit that this loser coke snorter private island owning whoring tax dodging revolving door participant 1%-er's profile makes it appear that he's a nominal liberal. Scum come in all guises; a big L Liberal this guy is not.
Us being anti-patent-everywhere people. The more these companies tear each other apart, the more obvious it becomes to disinterested observers that the system is broken.
If it's implanted in your brain any number of even MORE unlikely occurrences than getting it pulled out of your brain will have to have happened. We might as well go all the way imagine that they've replaced our entire nervous system with ones that transmit location and personal information.
That's what I am getting at. The incredible social resistance of such a scheme. Overcoming that resistance would be the REAL sci fi part of this. Never going to happen or at least not going to happen until the fact that this is being done is a fait accompli.
Why even talk about something that is not even physically possible? Back alley de-chipping anyone? Guaranteed to fool the chip sensors! Reprogrammed ships for sale! Guaranteed to fool the chip readers.
Only someone completely ignorant of the world she lives in- what battling computer viruses is like and -what deep seated and destabilizing animosity such programs would engender - could possibly proffer such a ridiculous statement.
This is publicity hounding and nothing ore, one hopes.
My argument is and will always be with scale, effect, and information reliability.
This is pathetically underspecific. You can apply this to anything you don't like for any reason at all. It is not a reasoned argument, or even an argument at all, it's an emotional tone.
Saying we have to cut all dependence on fossil fuels, coal, and the like is not a problem solution.
It's economic collapse.
And therefore AGW is false? Is there an argument in there somewhere?
Furthermore , as to your non-argument, no one is saying cut all fossil fuel; your statement is therefore a red herring. The Princeton Wedges concept - which if implemented would avert climate disaster and give us time to continue to develop alternative fuels- specifically does NOT require the abrupt discontinuation of all fossil fuels. I don't know of any plan that does. So, you used a red herring in an argument but worse, you use it in your own internal reasoning process.
Also, the US Navy is cutting their fossil fuel consumption by 50% no later than 2020. So apparently at least the Navy believes it can be done.
Also, there is not a consensus. In science, there should rarely ever be a consensus, until all outside explanations have been exhausted.
That is simply not how science is conducted nor could it be. No scientific theory ever is completely closed to modification, amendment, or rejection. It's an impossible standard that even Newton's laws cannot and in fact do not live up to. So all we have here is yet another poor argumentation technique- the demand of impossible standards. This is a completely typical denier technique and if accepted a perfect excuse for permanent inaction. Thankfully, no one in any position of responsibility takes this argument seriously.
Wikipedia has a decent list of scientists that oppose the notion of AGW negativity. So just because the majority says X does not mean there is consensus.
Widespread consensus means exactly super majority opinion which is even LESS than what we actually have- well over 95% agreement of scientists. To assert otherwise is to consciously and deliberately avoid seeking out the serious and definitive rebuttal of all such claims which is always available to anyone online.
Lists of scientists who are not climate experts, who have not published in the field, who are merely physicists or engineers and such like are pointless since none of these people have the required domain expertise. That's how science goes-- experts are just those people who spend all their time actively conducting research, making contributions, reading the literature and keeping up, not to mention doing the undergrad and grad school grunt work as a pre-requiste.
You can't be a dilettante - even a smart one who is or was an expert in another tangentially related field - and hope to offer arguments which will not be concisely and definitively torn apart by the real experts who spend all their time doing what you think you can do part time.
There are a few legitimate duly qualified dissenting scientists- a very few. There are also duly qualified scientists who do not believe that HIV causes AIDS. That's normal science and invariably the outliers are, just you you would suspect, wrong. This is true no matter how smart you are; Einstein's rejection of QM springs immediately to mind here.
All national academies of science are in agreement that AGW is real and caused by the release of carbon depots otherwise sequestered in coal, oil and other prehistoric depots. We know this is the source of the carbon because of the specific carbon isotope which is in such historical excess. We know that carbon is a greeenhouse gas and we know what concentration of said gases begin to cause the greenhouse effect. This is science from the 19th century.
It's amusing to see lists of alleged dissenting scientists bandied around the internet
Depressed students tended to use the internet in much different ways than their non-depressed classmates. Depressed students used file-sharing programs, like torrents or online sharing sites, more than non-depressed students (PDF). Depressed students also chatted more and sent more emails out. Online video viewing and game playing were also more popular for depressed students."
OK I issue the same challenge to you then. please don't keep us in the dark as to why you know better than the world's scientific bodies and duly qualified experts. No more hot air, put up or shut up.
Please, I know all the denier memes so start trotting them out so we can educate some people here.
And you do not accept AGW as a fact because why exactly? Please tell the world and the world's scientists because they'r anxious to hear your non-expert POV.
We're mostly engineers here. Some of us are also scientists and scientists are exceedingly cautious and humble about traveling outside their extremely limited domain of expertise.
So please , tell us why you know better than the world's assembled experts on this topic. And while you're at it, tell us about eh vast left wing conspiracy that keeps the large numb er of legitimate, duly qualified scientist's voices repressed on this topic.
I love it when deniers attempt to assume the mantle of "reasonable citizen" when in fact along with evolution deniers, two populations with enormous overlap in membership, they're the the living embodiment of anti-rational, reality-denying ideologues.
He warned Cebit delegates that unless young citizens were provided with safe and reliable ways to vote online, democracy as we know it could be dead within 20 years. People would expect biometric, cryptographic online identification verification that was 100 per cent secure in order to vote online.
Without that he said that without that conventional modes of democracy could be extinct within two decades as the younger generation would not vote in a conventional physical polling booth, which could lead to âoevery serious conflict between the generations.â
Really young'uns won't show up to the ye olde fashioned polling boothe? And his evidence for this is.. what exactly? The Arab Spring, where polling booths..... didn't work... correctly?
He recommends biometrics.. what biometrics exactly? Surely not this:
So now the US truly stands alone as being the only developed nation to commit to doing jack to stop the planet from becoming an uninhabitable Mad Max style hell-hole.
Can the survivors sue for everything he'll ever earn ever ?
INTENTIONAL INFLICTION OF EMOTIONAL DISTRESS
The tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress has four elements: (1) the defendant must act intentionally or recklessly; (2) the defendant's conduct must be extreme and outrageous; and (3) the conduct must be the cause (4) of severe emotional distress.
Slashdot Mirror
However true it may be in real life, it's too complicated for the law to directly define and address. The way to deal with this if you think it's a problem is indirectly.. by working to make sure society maintains some basic level of equity amongst its citizens irrespective of relative wealth. For a lot of people inequity is like porn- you know it when you see it, but not everyone shares the same definition.
Yeah we're not disagreeing that much . Of course consumers have to pay for stuff... I am a big defender (around these parts LOL) of recognizing that people need to get paid to produce work and cable companies are no different.
My concern is with the fact that this guy is the head of FCC and seems massively disinterested and out of touch with what's going on in the land - air duopoly (comcast- verizon) . Your general point is that it costs money to run stuff -hey that's the same point I am always trying to make around here. ! It costs money to run stuff and it costs money to invest in infrastructure so you can run stuff. That money has to come from somewhere, but without a truly competitive market in place where there are low barriers to entry and consumers can switch their choices frictionlessly , we need oversight.
The point you're trying to make is incorrect.
The advantages of fibre optic over electrical lines is just exactly that you don't have to push electrons across a wire to transmit information. In general, increasing bandwidth over an electrical connection requires more power. Carrying terabits over fiber optic networks requires phenomenally less power and the power is not proportional to the number of bytes that fiber optic is carrying.
Any increase in power that comes from keeping the equipment optical going - lasers, tranducers and modulators - is minimal enough compared to the HUGE increase in bandwidth to effectively break the connection between bytes sent and running electrical costs.
. It's not enough to point to a distant law of physics when you're arguing about real world economics.
The point I am trying to make is twofold. One is as a business, the concern fo ISPs is to maximize profits. The best way to do that is to charge more for doing nothing, or repressing competition, which is what they're always looking to do.
That's why we need something outside of business to look after the interest of people . Something with enough collective power that it can control those real world entities who would advantage themselves, or Hisself in the case of a King, at everyone else's expense. The idea we came up with a couple hundred years ago was called "government" by for and of the people.
Utilities are regulated for just this reason. People NEED the internet as much as they NEED electricity. It's now a fundamental necessity for modern life. If you don't pay your electricity bill, the lights go off, but that's not the same as saying the electrical companies are deregulated. Enron was deregulated electricity. That's when they started doing shit like turning off generators to drive up prices. This is what businesses will do given the chance. Sorry.
The point of my post is to say that these ISPs need to be regulated and watchdogged and minimal price / performance standards set by an entity outside of themselves.
That's how modernity works. anything else is a form of despotism either by Kings or businesses, whoever gets enough power to screw everyone else over.
Was this directed towards my comment ?
It's not morally wrong, it's temporarily technically and socially not possible. That's just a reality of today's world. I am not anxious to spend time money and resources on defeating this ubiquitous fact. In the future, something either the product or the business model or whatever will change and all will be well again. When will that be? ...mmmm some of us are trying to make the future happen ;
No shit. SNARK ATTACK-->Why can't they tell everyone what they're doing and how it's going and where its weaknesses are! We deserve to know! We paid for it!
Its amazing to me how many people are so paranoid about their pirated shit that they FEAR the FBI doing what it's supposed to do because it might be turned against their pirate p0rn collection and Jay Zee rips.
I have a solution. Stop prosecuting people for ripping shit and tell the makers of digital shit to figure out another business model but don't look to law enforcement to prop them up. No more law enforcement resources or court resources dedicated to prosecuting RIAA suits and such like. Just fucking deal with it.
If a terrorists plot gets through do we really want it to be partially because they had the accidental cooperation of people who were trying to sneak Game Of Thrones around online?
We need a clear separation in mandates between the FBI et al using advanced technology to capture real threats and pirating teenagers and the parents who love them.
We just can't care about that shit and we have to make it known the FBI et al are not going to be interested in that shit so people don't have this anti-law enforcement attitude on account of they themselves being technically engaged in some stupid low level criminal activity.
The book Freakanomics went over a case something like the beggarware involving bagels and it turns out if other people see whether or not you paid, nearly everyone pays. Otherwise, nearly no one pays.. it was in the single digits.
Is this a thing culture can overcome? Obviously the impulse to get free stuff is genetically based, but so are a lot of bad impulses.
Further the new boss through itâ(TM)s surrogates like Electronic Frontier Foundation seems to be waging a cynical PR campaign that equates the unauthorized use of other peopleâ(TM)s property (artistâ(TM)s songs) with freedom. A sort of Cyber â"Bolshevik campaign of mass collectivization for the good of the stateâ¦er .. I mean Internet. I say cynical because when it comes to their intellectual property, software patents for instance, these same companies fight tooth and nail.
Let me get this straight EFF is a surrogate for Apple and Google is making money off your music? By illegal downloading?
Your problem isn't any of the players you're citing. It's that computers are gigantic copy machines that make perfect copies. That's what all this is about. The new business models that can leverage this new fact about reality aren't here as far as I know. They will come in time. It's a new thing , this gigantic distributed copy machine, and some people are going to get screwed.
FWIW I would buy an album I liked directly from the artist for 5.99 US dollars. More than that and I am either looking for a used copy (for less than 5.99 or just waiting until such becomes available and listening to / reading something else until then.
I think with no real evidence there are a lot of people like me.
Anyways EFF is your friend and Goggle is your friend. Your missive is a study in how many different (really different) ways people can slice and dice innocent parts of reality into a conspiracy theory so long as no evidence is required to support said conspiracy.
It's incredibly hard to change jobs. After a few changes, what does your resume look like? Job hopper, that's what. The soft power that actually control people's lives are never taken into account or just wished away in all these kinds of schemes.
Under the covers, it's the same argument that laws are costless self enforcing entities. You say X will happen and then you go to make it happen and you find out what the resistance to it is and the net effect is it just can't happen for reasons which are not obvious apriori on paper.
We live and spend our years and die in the real world as it really is. It's not really possible to move to another state, then another after that one pisses you off and then another. You lose money friends local connections a sense of place and rootedness for your kids and other intangibles every time you move.
Maybe if you 're willing to work at ANY McDonalds ANYWHERE and be single your entire life such a scheme could be implemented. But even then, wouldn't it be more practical and less a waste of your life's time and energy to just have a baseline of reasonable behavior- in labor and safety laws, in environmental issues in all the things that are just universal values and undergird your ability to live whatever kind of life you want to live enforced by the federal government?
What good is state based feudalism? The serfs never win under feudalism of any description.
The ONLY purpose of such a law would be to keep poorer people down and in their place by denying them access to the best richest and most byte-filled stuff and limiting how much they can do online relative to their more fortunate peers.
If they can meter bytes the way they meter water they can control who sees what. Rich people see more and better things sooner. That's the ONLY purpose of schemes like this.
We have that now to a degree, but this scheme would codify it in a way it's not now codified. The vast majority people have the same per month cap imposed on them. Metering bytes would effectively cap people in direct proportion to their wealth. Sure , rich people can afford to buy as many capped monthly accounts as they want (say) but that just describes the problem- rich people have unfair access to more and privileged information, not a state of affairs we want to codify.
This guy is acting as a stalking horse to this long wished for wet dream on the part of the telcoms and cable companies. Rest assured they're watching to see what the reactions will be. Be sure to register your reaction.
Rest assured also that this sub-human gutter animal will position himself to profit enormously should such a byte regime ever come down.
It's long past time to pay for universal and near -as-you-can-get-all-you-can-eat internet access with taxes. This is what they're really terrified of- Muni WiFi.
Taxes paid for he development of the internet and the only legislation and regulation I want to see on it is
1) network neutrality- no bidding wars between content providers for access to the internet and
2) mandated bandwidth / total megabyte allowances going up each year at the same or better cost using South Korea and other first world nations as models with technical analysis of reasonable potential capabilities and capacity conducted by MIT as benchmarks of what can and should be possible at any given time point.
I'm ashamed to be forced to admit that this loser coke snorter private island owning whoring tax dodging revolving door participant 1%-er's profile makes it appear that he's a nominal liberal. Scum come in all guises; a big L Liberal this guy is not.
5 camps: us, them, di-stupid di-smart, di-di.
(us+di-smart > them di-stupid )
di-di irrelevant.
Us being anti-patent-everywhere people. The more these companies tear each other apart, the more obvious it becomes to disinterested observers that the system is broken.
That's what I am getting at. The incredible social resistance of such a scheme. Overcoming that resistance would be the REAL sci fi part of this. Never going to happen or at least not going to happen until the fact that this is being done is a fait accompli.
Only someone completely ignorant of the world she lives in- what battling computer viruses is like and -what deep seated and destabilizing animosity such programs would engender - could possibly proffer such a ridiculous statement.
This is publicity hounding and nothing ore, one hopes.
My argument is and will always be with scale, effect, and information reliability.
This is pathetically underspecific. You can apply this to anything you don't like for any reason at all. It is not a reasoned argument, or even an argument at all, it's an emotional tone.
Saying we have to cut all dependence on fossil fuels, coal, and the like is not a problem solution. It's economic collapse.
And therefore AGW is false? Is there an argument in there somewhere?
Furthermore , as to your non-argument, no one is saying cut all fossil fuel; your statement is therefore a red herring. The Princeton Wedges concept - which if implemented would avert climate disaster and give us time to continue to develop alternative fuels- specifically does NOT require the abrupt discontinuation of all fossil fuels. I don't know of any plan that does. So, you used a red herring in an argument but worse, you use it in your own internal reasoning process.
Also, the US Navy is cutting their fossil fuel consumption by 50% no later than 2020. So apparently at least the Navy believes it can be done.
Also, there is not a consensus. In science, there should rarely ever be a consensus, until all outside explanations have been exhausted.
That is simply not how science is conducted nor could it be. No scientific theory ever is completely closed to modification, amendment, or rejection. It's an impossible standard that even Newton's laws cannot and in fact do not live up to. So all we have here is yet another poor argumentation technique- the demand of impossible standards. This is a completely typical denier technique and if accepted a perfect excuse for permanent inaction. Thankfully, no one in any position of responsibility takes this argument seriously.
Wikipedia has a decent list of scientists that oppose the notion of AGW negativity. So just because the majority says X does not mean there is consensus.
Widespread consensus means exactly super majority opinion which is even LESS than what we actually have- well over 95% agreement of scientists. To assert otherwise is to consciously and deliberately avoid seeking out the serious and definitive rebuttal of all such claims which is always available to anyone online.
Lists of scientists who are not climate experts, who have not published in the field, who are merely physicists or engineers and such like are pointless since none of these people have the required domain expertise. That's how science goes-- experts are just those people who spend all their time actively conducting research, making contributions, reading the literature and keeping up, not to mention doing the undergrad and grad school grunt work as a pre-requiste.
You can't be a dilettante - even a smart one who is or was an expert in another tangentially related field - and hope to offer arguments which will not be concisely and definitively torn apart by the real experts who spend all their time doing what you think you can do part time.
There are a few legitimate duly qualified dissenting scientists- a very few. There are also duly qualified scientists who do not believe that HIV causes AIDS. That's normal science and invariably the outliers are, just you you would suspect, wrong. This is true no matter how smart you are; Einstein's rejection of QM springs immediately to mind here.
All national academies of science are in agreement that AGW is real and caused by the release of carbon depots otherwise sequestered in coal, oil and other prehistoric depots. We know this is the source of the carbon because of the specific carbon isotope which is in such historical excess. We know that carbon is a greeenhouse gas and we know what concentration of said gases begin to cause the greenhouse effect. This is science from the 19th century.
It's amusing to see lists of alleged dissenting scientists bandied around the internet
Nice going in this thread.
Depressed students tended to use the internet in much different ways than their non-depressed classmates. Depressed students used file-sharing programs, like torrents or online sharing sites, more than non-depressed students (PDF). Depressed students also chatted more and sent more emails out. Online video viewing and game playing were also more popular for depressed students."
I mean Jesus, what else is there?
OK so it's been enough hours for my worthy opponent to post a reply.
I think that pretty much says it all.
Early Grey. Hot. London Fog.
Fuck ....sorry. Mea culpa.. it was the layout of the posts on my screen. Total apologies are due to you, good Sir.
OK I issue the same challenge to you then. please don't keep us in the dark as to why you know better than the world's scientific bodies and duly qualified experts. No more hot air, put up or shut up.
Please, I know all the denier memes so start trotting them out so we can educate some people here.
Waiting....
We're mostly engineers here. Some of us are also scientists and scientists are exceedingly cautious and humble about traveling outside their extremely limited domain of expertise.
So please , tell us why you know better than the world's assembled experts on this topic. And while you're at it, tell us about eh vast left wing conspiracy that keeps the large numb er of legitimate, duly qualified scientist's voices repressed on this topic.
I love it when deniers attempt to assume the mantle of "reasonable citizen" when in fact along with evolution deniers, two populations with enormous overlap in membership, they're the the living embodiment of anti-rational, reality-denying ideologues.
He warned Cebit delegates that unless young citizens were provided with safe and reliable ways to vote online, democracy as we know it could be dead within 20 years. People would expect biometric, cryptographic online identification verification that was 100 per cent secure in order to vote online.
Without that he said that without that conventional modes of democracy could be extinct within two decades as the younger generation would not vote in a conventional physical polling booth, which could lead to âoevery serious conflict between the generations.â
Really young'uns won't show up to the ye olde fashioned polling boothe? And his evidence for this is.. what exactly? The Arab Spring, where polling booths ..... didn't work... correctly?
He recommends biometrics.. what biometrics exactly? Surely not this:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/steriley/archive/2006/09/20/457845.aspx
So now the US truly stands alone as being the only developed nation to commit to doing jack to stop the planet from becoming an uninhabitable Mad Max style hell-hole.
We're number one ! We're number one !
INTENTIONAL INFLICTION OF EMOTIONAL DISTRESS
The tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress has four elements: (1) the defendant must act intentionally or recklessly; (2) the defendant's conduct must be extreme and outrageous; and (3) the conduct must be the cause (4) of severe emotional distress.
cited from: http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/intentional_infliction_of_emotional_distress