> I suspect the real reason for his upping his ante of crazy in his shows is that his ratings are in freefall.
Eh? Always be suspicious when someone is presenting bad news about someone they obviously don't like. So lets look at Friday's numbers since I didn't see Monday instantly: Beck's numbers along with the highest number from the competing news channels are reproduced below. Man I'd hate to suck that hard.;) Seriously, if that is failure I'd like to be one.
No he isn't beating the other three networks' best numbers.... combined. Quite. But he is carrying his 5pm timeslot with numbers greater than the combined 1612 ratings of CNN, CNNH and MSNBC. So lets stay in the reality based world in our discussions, m'kay?
>..consensus will be determined by who has the most endurance in the argument.
More likely it will end up being determined exactly like it does on Wikipedia. By who ends up with the power to end the argument. In Wikipedia's case by locking edits. Because everyone isn't equal, even on Wikipedia some animals are more equal than others. This is reality and no matter how hard starry eyed utopians dream it doesn't change that somebody always ends up in charge.
I prefer Jonah Goldberg's description of Democracy. It is the belief that a majority (by a margin of just one vote) can vote to piss in the corn flakes of the minority. And if you are a believer in 'Democracy' and end up on the losing side all you can do is make sure the votes were properly counted, then ya gotta drink the piss. Because if you wouldn't drink the piss you don't really believe in Democracy.
Which was why the Founders here in the US thought Democracy was the absolute worst possible form of government, even counting Monarchy, and made sure to establish for us a Constitutional Republic with the Rule of Law vs Democracy's Rule of Men. Here we put it down right up front in our Declaration of Independence that "..all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..." That means nobody can piss in someone else's corn flakes even if the vote is 9-1, the one can say NO. Of course all that paper is good for is slowing things down if a super majority is dead set on something stupid long enough to go through the Amendment process but that defect exists in all forms of government. And at least the small oppressed minority is clearly given the moral authority to start shootin'.:) Unalienable is just that, not subject to review or revision by Man, once ya buy into that you don't give it up for nobody and words like "Molon Labe" get used.
And that gets us to the idiocy that is e-democracy, e-government, Ross Perot's Electronic Town Hall and today's article and Open Source government. It's all rubbish and will lead to mass graves if we are dumb enough to trade our Republic for it. The difference between the USA or California or even Tumbleweed Pissant Town, Little State and Apache is such that they aren't in the same category. If you don't like the way Apache is governed, developed or whatever you don't have to use it, you can fork it or go off and make your own web server... with black jack and hookers! Government is force. Always. And it isn't ever needed when everyone agrees, it is always used to force one group of people to obey another group's commands on pain of force. Good government is more about placing enough restraints on its actions while still leaving it able to accomplish the limited duties that we haven't figured out how to get done through purely free means.
> Climate change is different than AGW... even though some people tend to try to group them together..
We group them together because Global Climate Change was the focus group tested replacement that works in all climates. After screaming "Ice Age" in the 70's and "We Gonna all Burn or Drown!" in the 90's and naughies and seeing a cooling trend setting in again they figured it was best to settle on a generic term. Hint: If both rising and falling temps demand the same solution you are probably dealing with people who have a Solution in search of a Problem. Combine with the observation that if you scratch a Green you will probably find a Red and the Solution being pushed is warmed over Marxism and certain of us with a suspicious mind have these heretical thoughts.
"It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out." â" Carl Sagan
Yea, that guy. Go watch his Cosmos series. Talking about the coming ice age if we didn't build a world government (not specifically stated but implied since it is the only viable solution to the stated problem) to save us from out wicked ways. Then in the addendum taped for the anniversary he is doubleplus good duckspeaking the new party line about the exact same inputs going to kill us all by warming if we don't implement the exact same solutions.
Back in the 70's and early 80's everyone was doom and glooming about an impending ice age because we were going through a cold period and the media was all to happy to mingle it with the stories of blizzards. Then things warmed up and it was global warming about to eat babies and bitch slap puppies. People who should have known better were predicting the end of snow in England, monster hurricanes etc. Now things are cooling off again and global warming is replaced with Global Climate Change.
From where I sit the stench is bullshit. Only question is whether it is just deluded green fools needing a new faith in something larger than themselves to replace the ones (old fashioned things like Honor, God and Country) they abandoned or whether they know they are lying for a 'greater purpose.' This is just opinion, but I figure it is both. Lots of lost fools being useful idiots for hard core marxists who are all too happy to use them. They have already managed to taint the reputation of science (and that is going to prove to be very BAD) and are on the brink of collapsing our civilization.
> How is it anti-science to teach the weaknesses of a theory?
It isn't. But schools are now about pushing religion. And like all religions they are convinced they have the Truth and have little tolerance for other faiths. So they hijacked the word "Science" and made sure all 'Religion' was driven out of the schools leaving their faith unopposed.
Pretty bold statement, but it is true. Take AGW for example, it is taught as 'settled science, the Truth which must not be questioned.' But if it is science it should be falsifiable and it isn't. Weather gets warm, AGW, colder, Global Climate Change which is just AGW rebranded. More snow, Climate Change, less Climate Change. More hurricanes? Less? Either way it is AGW. The sceptics find flaws and outright fraud in the models and datasets and they are attacked and suppressed. So since/. is full of AGW believers, prove me wrong. Tell me of a test that would falsify AGW theory? Better, tell me of one that was proposed a decade ago that was run and the results are in on because I don't think anyone has even proposed submitting AGW to such rigor. Of course a hundred such tests don't prove AGW is true, it just adds evidence in it's favor, while ONE test that turns up FALSIFIED is usually fatal to a theory. (If it won't kill a theory it isn't a proper test.)
And while AGW is the most obvious example it isn't the only example of new age progressive religion pretending to be Science. After all, what most people think of as Science[1] meets every test of the definition of 'Religion.' A 'religion' doesn't need a bearded white guy in the sky, it just needs to be a belief system that claims to have the answer to "Life, the Universe and Everything" and mainstream Science makes that claim. It shouldn't.
So if we are resigned to religion in the schools we probably should make an effort to ensure kids are familiar with the arguments of most of the major religious/philosophical systems. At least Secular Humanism, Christianity (Catholic and Protestant), Islam and Judaism and probably one of the Eastern religions outside the monothism threesome. Then we could drive ALL of them out of Science and leave Science classes to Science.
[1] Science is just the application of the Scientific Method to attempt to discover the laws of the universe. Experiments that are repeatable, that sort of thing. Very useful for determining What the universe is and How it works but useless for attempting to answer Why.
SOme of those ideas have some merit. But in general that smells a lot like direct Democracy and Democracy is a terrible idea. The US Founders considered it to be worse than any of the other options, Kings included. No, the answer is to keep government small enough that a) the voters have a decent shot of keeping up with what it is doing without it being a full time job and b) it doesn't have much opportunity to be evil in the first place.
Take this example. If the Australian government weren't so large that it's buying decisions pretty much dictate what everyone else uses because everyone does a large percentage of their business with the government it wouldn't matter as much what they picked. And it wouldn't be such a tempting target for backroom dirty dealing.
Not at all. Of course we have done a lot of underhanded stuff. Welcome to International Relations in the real world as opposed to your textbook. There are no pure good or pure evil actors or actions. Just nations with conflicting goals, resources and all doing whatever they think is in their long term self interest.
Iran Contra was more an internal squabble in the US. Congress was shorting out the Executive's ability to conduct foreign policy so certain elements resorted to less than lilly white means to fund needed operations. As for the Shah, can you look back with the benefit of hindsight and say the Shah wasn't the right choice for us to have backed? Hello!
And Hell yes it was right, in the context of the Cold War, to back the Afgan rebels against the Russians. It was a major turning point in the Cold War. Do most solutions carry the seeds of another new problem? Yup. But nothing UBL could possibly do compares to the wholesale slaughter that the Cold War going Hot would have caused and giving the Afgans a helping hand helped bring the Cold War to a peaceful resolution.
As for Saddam, no I won't relitigate the depraved fantasies of the Bush Deranged. Hell, you probably still believe Saddam didn't have WMD and Cheney was involved in outting Plame.
If I had to take a good guess and speak for the consensus opinion it would probably be to keep a lid on the various hotspots so as to avoid having to save the world a third time. And yea there is a strong undercurrent of seeing it as a duty to continue carrying on the 'White Man's Burden' after the Brits stumbled and became unable to do it any more while at the same time worrying that trying to civilize/police the world is what undone them.
Most Americans would really rather to be able to ignore the rest of the world but if we don't step up who will? When all was lost and a dark age of despair was descending on the world Team America would be expected to come in again to save the motherfucking day so we figure it is easier to just keep the next World War from getting going. Yea a bunch of smelly hippies don't like that reality and call us 'imperialists' and such but until they can offer a better plan to keep the world from descending into madness they can just suck on our balls.
The above is why I said I (and believe most Americans) really wouldn't mind seeing a few of the more sane emerging powers step up their participation. It is the countries with conquest, empire and general mayhem on their minds that pose a problem for global stability, not any rising power to challenge the unipolar post cold war world.
Bull. International relations ain't kindergarten. Our opponents have goals that are incompatible with ours, thus we are called opponents. Russia dreams of empire lost. China dreams of empire to come. Iran dreams of dominating the Middle East and restoring the glory of Persia as an atomic power. Meanwhile madmen in North Korea and Venezuela dream their mad dreams of power and glory. We have valid reasons to be working to thwart, slow and otherwise hinder those plans.
So tell me mr enlightened one, which one of those country's plans should we either get out of the way of or encourage. Or more bluntly, which of our allies should we throw under the bus to appease them. All of Eastern Europe? NATO? Taiwan? Israel? South Korea and Japan?
Meanwhile India and Brazil also are taking a larger place on the world's stage and we don't really mind. Hell, if you ask me carrying the 'White Man's Burden' is getting to not be worth it and we could use some other halfway sane players to step up and take an active role putting out diplomatic fires and cleaning up after natural disasters.
> False... you'll need to be more than "economy viable" to do it, > you'd need to be self-sufficient.
Considering the cost of lofting anything with more mass than a microchip, any moon colony that would be big enough to attract the lawyers would pretty much have to be self sufficient. Moon back to Earth is cheap, especially once you have a mass driver. Earth to Moon is expensive and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Hell, Earth to LEO is likely to be the limiting expense on most space activity until we find something better than chemical propulsion.
And if push came to shove, I suspect any moon colony would be able to manage simple chip fabrication if it became a matter of survival, especially since wafer production (for solar cells) would probably be one of the first things to get set up. The big problem would be obtaining raw elements that aren't available on the moon.
> are they a good thing - because they are pretty synonymous > in the current stage of capitalism,
Which is the problem. In a properly designed society freedom and responsibility are in balance as is authority and responsibility. The modern corporation breaks that rule. The shareholders are only liable for their investment, regardless what the corporation does. The CEO, unless he gets caught personally tossing puppies in a wood chipper or something, can only be fired (with the golden parachute of course left intact) even if he drives the corporation into oblivion, creates a dozen SuperFund sites, whatever. None of the Board of Directors will be held personally liable for pretty much anything the corporation does.
Yes the modern corporation also offers advantages in mobility of capital, etc. But I propose many of those advantages could be retained if we moved back to partnerships and private companies and even corporations that aren't publicly traded. Bonds can always be sold to raise capital without blurring the lines of accountability like corporations do.
Just look at the recent banking mess. People did things they knew were stupid because they also knew they would have their bonus banked when it blew up and they would still have a job. Back when those big Wall Street houses were founded they were partnerships and the owners would have been left destitute in a fiasco like the current one. So they didn't make stupid investments very often, it was their money they were playing with, not "The Corporation's".
> And if you don't need to do that, then the lawyers and the governments > (with lawyers and weapons) can also come to you.
Actually, no. If you are mining lunar resources in sufficient quantity to be economically viable and delivering them to earth orbit you, by definition, are in possession of sufficient tech with direct military application that you could tell the earthers to self procreate. Do the math. Instead of delivering a ton of water into low earth orbit you could just drop a ton of rock on the Pentagon or the UN building. BLAM! Foe dies instantly, no saving throw allowed. Do the math, that ordinary rock would have a hell of a lot of kinetic energy coming straight down the gravity well of the Earth-Moon system. And with a mass driver as launcher you could repeat as often as needed until the lesson sunk in. Reread The Moon is a Harsh Mistress if you aren't clear on this point.
Yea. And it doesn't work, unlike Capitalism which actually creates wealth. Our current economic difficulties are the result of a mixed economy, one where profit is capitalist and loss is socialist, one where government intervention in the economy is so extreme in some areas it is hard to call it a market with a straight face. And yes one where corporations are too powerful. But guess what a corporation is? A GOVERNMENT created psuedo entity.
The problem corporations create is a loss of responsibility. Some capitalist creates a great company, it goes IPO and becomes a corporation. The founder is run off or eventually retires and then what happens? Some snot nosed Harvard MBA steeped in Marxist theory is given control over a few billion dollars of economic resources. He then sets out to be 'socially responsible' so as to get invited to the right parties, have glowing cover shoots on the fashionable industry publications and satisfy the snot nose Yale Marxist MBA running the mutual fund he needs to convince to buy into the new stock issue coming up. Then when things go horribly wrong (how could that possibly happen with the smart people in charge?) they ask the government to bail their sorry asses out... and save the pension fund for the union that the corporation and the union goons have been shamelessly raiding for decades.
Which is a big part of the attraction of building a moonbase. The deluded dream that if we could just get off this rock we could start over and do it better the next time. As if. Who would be building that moonbase? And the UN has already laid claim to every inch inside and out of every celesital body so forget staking a claim and living that pioneer lifestyle.
> I'm rooting for WebOS to find a foothold somehow...
Why? What does it offer? PalmOS had a lot to offer in its day, small, sleek, resource efficient in a way no Linux could hope to be, as open as possible without going whole hog FS/OS, etc. But now that it is mutated into WebOS? Does anyone think HP has the mojo to make it a player even if it is a technical winner?
I'll root a little for Meego but realize there are almost certainly doomed. The hope of the world to remain free from the RDF is on a half assed Java clone. Shudder.
You are missing the point. This whole fight is about video standards in HTML5, which won't be widely used for several more years. So if vendors start putting WebM into portable products currently in the pipeline the market will have plenty of products in the field by the time HTML5 is in wide use. Yes people with trailing edge hardware will suffer from software decoding but that is life on the tech treadmill. The only problem will be if Apple refuses to see which way the industry is heading and ends up being the ones who become known for crappy video support AND no flash. Which probably won't matter anyway since Apple people will buy whatever has Apple ships and insist it is the best thing since sex.
> Why is Apple's stock so prone to heavy fluctuation at the even the slightest hint of something not being perfect?
Because it is a bubble. Everyone is buying Apple because everyone is buying Apple. And that is always a highly unstable situation that smart money avoids because nobody can predict when the cycle ends. Apple's stock is priced like their sales in the next decade were going to grow at the same insane rate they did in the last. And they can't. All the people with more money than sense already have an iPhone and most ran out and bought an iPad already. The most they can hope to do is get those customers to stay on the upgrade treadmill, which means at most flat to slow earnings growth. And they now have strong competition in the smart phone space and soon the tablet market. iPods are now a commodity market so not much growth to be found there. Macs have not really been gaining market share in the last decade and probably will decline in the next as Apple stops caring about products without the App Store revenue stream.
> Jobs could stub his toe and the stock would drop.
And that is likely to be what pops the bubble, and because Apple will be doing everything in its power to cover up any bad news in that dept until they simply can't deny it any more the risk is insane. Apple valuation is almost entirely based on the Cult of Steve. Without Steve Apple is nothing, everyone else is a mindless idiot who couldn't design anything customers would actually buy. No that isn't true, but it doesn't matter because a critical mass believes it to be true and will act on that belief. And because Apple is valued as if it were true, without Steve at the helm the stock will correct to a more sensible valuation, wiping out tens of billions of paper wealth overnight and might set off a panic in the wider markets. Yes Apple has sales and some insanely great profit margins. But enough to justify their market cap? When they have no assets except current sales, goodwill and Steve on their balance sheet? They have zero plant & equipment as they outsource 100% of manufacturing to China. They have some (probably leased) office space here in the US and some developers, marketing folks and such.
But the market believes they are more valuable than every other mega corp with the exception of Exxon-Mobil? Really? We have seen this movie before when Amazon was valued higher than Boeing. Back when Pets.com had a big market cap and venture capitalists were falling over themselves to get in on drkoop.com. We know know how the story ends.
I don't know anything about the state of Apple support since I don't own one. But as a Linux user I do know all HP products are fully supported there. So I am implying that if one connects the dots that Apple's platform is probably supported as well since both use cups and there are a heck of a lot more Macs in the field than Linux desktops. Just ain't going to make the claim for certain since I'd be talking outta my butt.
And I'd actually buy HP products because of their explicit, well done and long term support if the cost of ownership weren't so damned high. So instead I tend toward Oki. Make sure you get one with Postscript and toner and drum unit sold as separate items and you get a great printing experience under Linux plus a lot lower price per page. If your distro doesn't support it out of the box there will be a PPD on the driver cd.
That would be stupid and fatal long term. We would never again see Linux lead the way anywhere if we hitched ourselves to Microsoft's trailer hitch. All this new push to ARM would have never been possible had not Linux lead the way there and created a potential market large enough to get Microsoft to follow. Your idea would have forever tied us to x86.
NVidia has a top tier 3D driver now because high dollar workstation users these days use Linux instead of legacy UNIX. That means there is money in keeping their drivers good enough to keep those super high margin cards moving out of their factory and not AMD/ATI's. But AMD wants in, not only there but on desktops and lacking the development resources are instead opening the specs. So be patient and soon we will have two hight quality options. Intel is already supplying fair driver support but they just don't compete well on the hardware.
Had we somehow adopted the Microsoft driver model (heavy emphasis on the somehow) none of this progress would have happened.
> Apple had to make a completely new networked printing system which > is only supported by a handful of HP printers.
That is just ignorant. Apple didn't create CUPS they adopted it then later bought the primary developer/custodian. And unless they have changed policy, all HP printing products are supported on Linux. Since Apple and most Linux distros use CUPS to print nowadays, connect the dots.
Google cares about having their browser run well on Linux because they intend it to run on Chrome OS. Mozilla doesn't really care about Linux support going all the way back to when they were Netscape. Linux/UNIX has never been a 1st class target, only a port with a 'couple guys' working on it.
Seriously, I bought Netscape 1.0 and the Linux binary wasn't even on the CD. Back then buying was the only way to get export prohibited crypto. When I asked them about it I got blown off. Some years they care a little more than that, others about that little. At all time they make it clear a hold up on a port won't slow down feature development on their primary platform. IE is getting hardware assist so Firefox WILL ship it before IE9 leaves bets. And that probably makes sense from their pov.
> and glaciers... have retreated world-wide on average for many years.
Yes they have. And dumped out ancient settlements and cavemen as they retreated. Which I take to mean that those glaciers were smaller than they are now during the fairly short time humans (and close relations) have been wandering around. Thus I reason that they will probably be larger eventually.
NASA is also an organization that continued to employ James Hansen after he was outted as a lying liar who lies a lot. Lies a lot about Global Warming in particular and is cited in the very article this slashdot thread is arguing about. NASA utterly depends on Congress for it's funding and the winning play is to go along with the "Settled Science". NASA is also an agency in search of a reason to exist, seeing as how they are pretty much out of the space business after the shuttle goes to the Smithsonian later this year.
> Sure, humans will survive, but civilisation as we know it certainly won't.
Oh bullcrap. We can build a city in a few years and if we had to abandon all of the coastal anthills and start over we would be able to build better ones this time. Most of Europe was flattened during WWII and look how fast they came back. Assuming AGW alarmists are right we would still have decades to calmly and slowly move to higher ground. Decades for farmers to shift their planting patterns.
> People move and get on with life. The world doesn't end.
Um, no they don't. An hour or so south of where I'm sitting is a town called Cameron, LA. It has been wiped from the map three times in the last century. After the third one did they get on the cluetrain and move inland a few miles? Oh Hell no, Uncle Sugar was there ladling out the cash so they are industriously at work building it back yet again as we speak. The odds of a fourth total wipeout (wipeout as in part of the bank's vault and part of City Hall left standing) before hitting the century mark from number one is way better than fifty-fifty.
Most of New Orleans is below sea level. Common sense would have dictated taking the opportunity offered by Katrina to relocate some of the more vulnerable sections. Did they? Oh Hell no.
Go up the Mississippi river and count the towns that flood every decade or so and then count the ones that have finally got the hint and relocated. When river traffic was a town's lifeblood it made sense to take the risk, but nowadays?
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> I suspect the real reason for his upping his ante of crazy in his shows is that his ratings are in freefall.
Eh? Always be suspicious when someone is presenting bad news about someone they obviously don't like. So lets look at Friday's numbers since I didn't see Monday instantly: Beck's numbers along with the highest number from the competing news channels are reproduced below. Man I'd hate to suck that hard. ;) Seriously, if that is failure I'd like to be one.
Beck: 2.064
O’Reilly: 2.687
Maddow: 989
Blitzer: 750
Grace: 457
No he isn't beating the other three networks' best numbers.... combined. Quite. But he is carrying his 5pm timeslot with numbers greater than the combined 1612 ratings of CNN, CNNH and MSNBC. So lets stay in the reality based world in our discussions, m'kay?
> ..consensus will be determined by who has the most endurance in the argument.
More likely it will end up being determined exactly like it does on Wikipedia. By who ends up with the power to end the argument. In Wikipedia's case by locking edits. Because everyone isn't equal, even on Wikipedia some animals are more equal than others. This is reality and no matter how hard starry eyed utopians dream it doesn't change that somebody always ends up in charge.
I prefer Jonah Goldberg's description of Democracy. It is the belief that a majority (by a margin of just one vote) can vote to piss in the corn flakes of the minority. And if you are a believer in 'Democracy' and end up on the losing side all you can do is make sure the votes were properly counted, then ya gotta drink the piss. Because if you wouldn't drink the piss you don't really believe in Democracy.
Which was why the Founders here in the US thought Democracy was the absolute worst possible form of government, even counting Monarchy, and made sure to establish for us a Constitutional Republic with the Rule of Law vs Democracy's Rule of Men. Here we put it down right up front in our Declaration of Independence that "..all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..." That means nobody can piss in someone else's corn flakes even if the vote is 9-1, the one can say NO. Of course all that paper is good for is slowing things down if a super majority is dead set on something stupid long enough to go through the Amendment process but that defect exists in all forms of government. And at least the small oppressed minority is clearly given the moral authority to start shootin'. :) Unalienable is just that, not subject to review or revision by Man, once ya buy into that you don't give it up for nobody and words like "Molon Labe" get used.
And that gets us to the idiocy that is e-democracy, e-government, Ross Perot's Electronic Town Hall and today's article and Open Source government. It's all rubbish and will lead to mass graves if we are dumb enough to trade our Republic for it. The difference between the USA or California or even Tumbleweed Pissant Town, Little State and Apache is such that they aren't in the same category. If you don't like the way Apache is governed, developed or whatever you don't have to use it, you can fork it or go off and make your own web server... with black jack and hookers! Government is force. Always. And it isn't ever needed when everyone agrees, it is always used to force one group of people to obey another group's commands on pain of force. Good government is more about placing enough restraints on its actions while still leaving it able to accomplish the limited duties that we haven't figured out how to get done through purely free means.
> Climate change is different than AGW... even though some people tend to try to group them together..
We group them together because Global Climate Change was the focus group tested replacement that works in all climates. After screaming "Ice Age" in the 70's and "We Gonna all Burn or Drown!" in the 90's and naughies and seeing a cooling trend setting in again they figured it was best to settle on a generic term. Hint: If both rising and falling temps demand the same solution you are probably dealing with people who have a Solution in search of a Problem. Combine with the observation that if you scratch a Green you will probably find a Red and the Solution being pushed is warmed over Marxism and certain of us with a suspicious mind have these heretical thoughts.
"It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out."
â" Carl Sagan
Yea, that guy. Go watch his Cosmos series. Talking about the coming ice age if we didn't build a world government (not specifically stated but implied since it is the only viable solution to the stated problem) to save us from out wicked ways. Then in the addendum taped for the anniversary he is doubleplus good duckspeaking the new party line about the exact same inputs going to kill us all by warming if we don't implement the exact same solutions.
Back in the 70's and early 80's everyone was doom and glooming about an impending ice age because we were going through a cold period and the media was all to happy to mingle it with the stories of blizzards. Then things warmed up and it was global warming about to eat babies and bitch slap puppies. People who should have known better were predicting the end of snow in England, monster hurricanes etc. Now things are cooling off again and global warming is replaced with Global Climate Change.
From where I sit the stench is bullshit. Only question is whether it is just deluded green fools needing a new faith in something larger than themselves to replace the ones (old fashioned things like Honor, God and Country) they abandoned or whether they know they are lying for a 'greater purpose.' This is just opinion, but I figure it is both. Lots of lost fools being useful idiots for hard core marxists who are all too happy to use them. They have already managed to taint the reputation of science (and that is going to prove to be very BAD) and are on the brink of collapsing our civilization.
> How is it anti-science to teach the weaknesses of a theory?
It isn't. But schools are now about pushing religion. And like all religions they are convinced they have the Truth and have little tolerance for other faiths. So they hijacked the word "Science" and made sure all 'Religion' was driven out of the schools leaving their faith unopposed.
Pretty bold statement, but it is true. Take AGW for example, it is taught as 'settled science, the Truth which must not be questioned.' But if it is science it should be falsifiable and it isn't. Weather gets warm, AGW, colder, Global Climate Change which is just AGW rebranded. More snow, Climate Change, less Climate Change. More hurricanes? Less? Either way it is AGW. The sceptics find flaws and outright fraud in the models and datasets and they are attacked and suppressed. So since /. is full of AGW believers, prove me wrong. Tell me of a test that would falsify AGW theory? Better, tell me of one that was proposed a decade ago that was run and the results are in on because I don't think anyone has even proposed submitting AGW to such rigor. Of course a hundred such tests don't prove AGW is true, it just adds evidence in it's favor, while ONE test that turns up FALSIFIED is usually fatal to a theory. (If it won't kill a theory it isn't a proper test.)
And while AGW is the most obvious example it isn't the only example of new age progressive religion pretending to be Science. After all, what most people think of as Science[1] meets every test of the definition of 'Religion.' A 'religion' doesn't need a bearded white guy in the sky, it just needs to be a belief system that claims to have the answer to "Life, the Universe and Everything" and mainstream Science makes that claim. It shouldn't.
So if we are resigned to religion in the schools we probably should make an effort to ensure kids are familiar with the arguments of most of the major religious/philosophical systems. At least Secular Humanism, Christianity (Catholic and Protestant), Islam and Judaism and probably one of the Eastern religions outside the monothism threesome. Then we could drive ALL of them out of Science and leave Science classes to Science.
[1] Science is just the application of the Scientific Method to attempt to discover the laws of the universe. Experiments that are repeatable, that sort of thing. Very useful for determining What the universe is and How it works but useless for attempting to answer Why.
SOme of those ideas have some merit. But in general that smells a lot like direct Democracy and Democracy is a terrible idea. The US Founders considered it to be worse than any of the other options, Kings included. No, the answer is to keep government small enough that a) the voters have a decent shot of keeping up with what it is doing without it being a full time job and b) it doesn't have much opportunity to be evil in the first place.
Take this example. If the Australian government weren't so large that it's buying decisions pretty much dictate what everyone else uses because everyone does a large percentage of their business with the government it wouldn't matter as much what they picked. And it wouldn't be such a tempting target for backroom dirty dealing.
Not at all. Of course we have done a lot of underhanded stuff. Welcome to International Relations in the real world as opposed to your textbook. There are no pure good or pure evil actors or actions. Just nations with conflicting goals, resources and all doing whatever they think is in their long term self interest.
Iran Contra was more an internal squabble in the US. Congress was shorting out the Executive's ability to conduct foreign policy so certain elements resorted to less than lilly white means to fund needed operations. As for the Shah, can you look back with the benefit of hindsight and say the Shah wasn't the right choice for us to have backed? Hello!
And Hell yes it was right, in the context of the Cold War, to back the Afgan rebels against the Russians. It was a major turning point in the Cold War. Do most solutions carry the seeds of another new problem? Yup. But nothing UBL could possibly do compares to the wholesale slaughter that the Cold War going Hot would have caused and giving the Afgans a helping hand helped bring the Cold War to a peaceful resolution.
As for Saddam, no I won't relitigate the depraved fantasies of the Bush Deranged. Hell, you probably still believe Saddam didn't have WMD and Cheney was involved in outting Plame.
If I had to take a good guess and speak for the consensus opinion it would probably be to keep a lid on the various hotspots so as to avoid having to save the world a third time. And yea there is a strong undercurrent of seeing it as a duty to continue carrying on the 'White Man's Burden' after the Brits stumbled and became unable to do it any more while at the same time worrying that trying to civilize/police the world is what undone them.
Most Americans would really rather to be able to ignore the rest of the world but if we don't step up who will? When all was lost and a dark age of despair was descending on the world Team America would be expected to come in again to save the motherfucking day so we figure it is easier to just keep the next World War from getting going. Yea a bunch of smelly hippies don't like that reality and call us 'imperialists' and such but until they can offer a better plan to keep the world from descending into madness they can just suck on our balls.
The above is why I said I (and believe most Americans) really wouldn't mind seeing a few of the more sane emerging powers step up their participation. It is the countries with conquest, empire and general mayhem on their minds that pose a problem for global stability, not any rising power to challenge the unipolar post cold war world.
> If the US had a less hostile foreign policy....
Bull. International relations ain't kindergarten. Our opponents have goals that are incompatible with ours, thus we are called opponents. Russia dreams of empire lost. China dreams of empire to come. Iran dreams of dominating the Middle East and restoring the glory of Persia as an atomic power. Meanwhile madmen in North Korea and Venezuela dream their mad dreams of power and glory. We have valid reasons to be working to thwart, slow and otherwise hinder those plans.
So tell me mr enlightened one, which one of those country's plans should we either get out of the way of or encourage. Or more bluntly, which of our allies should we throw under the bus to appease them. All of Eastern Europe? NATO? Taiwan? Israel? South Korea and Japan?
Meanwhile India and Brazil also are taking a larger place on the world's stage and we don't really mind. Hell, if you ask me carrying the 'White Man's Burden' is getting to not be worth it and we could use some other halfway sane players to step up and take an active role putting out diplomatic fires and cleaning up after natural disasters.
> False... you'll need to be more than "economy viable" to do it,
> you'd need to be self-sufficient.
Considering the cost of lofting anything with more mass than a microchip, any moon colony that would be big enough to attract the lawyers would pretty much have to be self sufficient. Moon back to Earth is cheap, especially once you have a mass driver. Earth to Moon is expensive and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Hell, Earth to LEO is likely to be the limiting expense on most space activity until we find something better than chemical propulsion.
And if push came to shove, I suspect any moon colony would be able to manage simple chip fabrication if it became a matter of survival, especially since wafer production (for solar cells) would probably be one of the first things to get set up. The big problem would be obtaining raw elements that aren't available on the moon.
> are they a good thing - because they are pretty synonymous
> in the current stage of capitalism,
Which is the problem. In a properly designed society freedom and responsibility are in balance as is authority and responsibility. The modern corporation breaks that rule. The shareholders are only liable for their investment, regardless what the corporation does. The CEO, unless he gets caught personally tossing puppies in a wood chipper or something, can only be fired (with the golden parachute of course left intact) even if he drives the corporation into oblivion, creates a dozen SuperFund sites, whatever. None of the Board of Directors will be held personally liable for pretty much anything the corporation does.
Yes the modern corporation also offers advantages in mobility of capital, etc. But I propose many of those advantages could be retained if we moved back to partnerships and private companies and even corporations that aren't publicly traded. Bonds can always be sold to raise capital without blurring the lines of accountability like corporations do.
Just look at the recent banking mess. People did things they knew were stupid because they also knew they would have their bonus banked when it blew up and they would still have a job. Back when those big Wall Street houses were founded they were partnerships and the owners would have been left destitute in a fiasco like the current one. So they didn't make stupid investments very often, it was their money they were playing with, not "The Corporation's".
> And if you don't need to do that, then the lawyers and the governments
> (with lawyers and weapons) can also come to you.
Actually, no. If you are mining lunar resources in sufficient quantity to be economically viable and delivering them to earth orbit you, by definition, are in possession of sufficient tech with direct military application that you could tell the earthers to self procreate. Do the math. Instead of delivering a ton of water into low earth orbit you could just drop a ton of rock on the Pentagon or the UN building. BLAM! Foe dies instantly, no saving throw allowed. Do the math, that ordinary rock would have a hell of a lot of kinetic energy coming straight down the gravity well of the Earth-Moon system. And with a mass driver as launcher you could repeat as often as needed until the lesson sunk in. Reread The Moon is a Harsh Mistress if you aren't clear on this point.
> Sounds familiar?
Yea. And it doesn't work, unlike Capitalism which actually creates wealth. Our current economic difficulties are the result of a mixed economy, one where profit is capitalist and loss is socialist, one where government intervention in the economy is so extreme in some areas it is hard to call it a market with a straight face. And yes one where corporations are too powerful. But guess what a corporation is? A GOVERNMENT created psuedo entity.
The problem corporations create is a loss of responsibility. Some capitalist creates a great company, it goes IPO and becomes a corporation. The founder is run off or eventually retires and then what happens? Some snot nosed Harvard MBA steeped in Marxist theory is given control over a few billion dollars of economic resources. He then sets out to be 'socially responsible' so as to get invited to the right parties, have glowing cover shoots on the fashionable industry publications and satisfy the snot nose Yale Marxist MBA running the mutual fund he needs to convince to buy into the new stock issue coming up. Then when things go horribly wrong (how could that possibly happen with the smart people in charge?) they ask the government to bail their sorry asses out... and save the pension fund for the union that the corporation and the union goons have been shamelessly raiding for decades.
Which is a big part of the attraction of building a moonbase. The deluded dream that if we could just get off this rock we could start over and do it better the next time. As if. Who would be building that moonbase? And the UN has already laid claim to every inch inside and out of every celesital body so forget staking a claim and living that pioneer lifestyle.
> I'm rooting for WebOS to find a foothold somehow...
Why? What does it offer? PalmOS had a lot to offer in its day, small, sleek, resource efficient in a way no Linux could hope to be, as open as possible without going whole hog FS/OS, etc. But now that it is mutated into WebOS? Does anyone think HP has the mojo to make it a player even if it is a technical winner?
I'll root a little for Meego but realize there are almost certainly doomed. The hope of the world to remain free from the RDF is on a half assed Java clone. Shudder.
You are missing the point. This whole fight is about video standards in HTML5, which won't be widely used for several more years. So if vendors start putting WebM into portable products currently in the pipeline the market will have plenty of products in the field by the time HTML5 is in wide use. Yes people with trailing edge hardware will suffer from software decoding but that is life on the tech treadmill. The only problem will be if Apple refuses to see which way the industry is heading and ends up being the ones who become known for crappy video support AND no flash. Which probably won't matter anyway since Apple people will buy whatever has Apple ships and insist it is the best thing since sex.
> Why is Apple's stock so prone to heavy fluctuation at the even the slightest hint of something not being perfect?
Because it is a bubble. Everyone is buying Apple because everyone is buying Apple. And that is always a highly unstable situation that smart money avoids because nobody can predict when the cycle ends. Apple's stock is priced like their sales in the next decade were going to grow at the same insane rate they did in the last. And they can't. All the people with more money than sense already have an iPhone and most ran out and bought an iPad already. The most they can hope to do is get those customers to stay on the upgrade treadmill, which means at most flat to slow earnings growth. And they now have strong competition in the smart phone space and soon the tablet market. iPods are now a commodity market so not much growth to be found there. Macs have not really been gaining market share in the last decade and probably will decline in the next as Apple stops caring about products without the App Store revenue stream.
> Jobs could stub his toe and the stock would drop.
And that is likely to be what pops the bubble, and because Apple will be doing everything in its power to cover up any bad news in that dept until they simply can't deny it any more the risk is insane. Apple valuation is almost entirely based on the Cult of Steve. Without Steve Apple is nothing, everyone else is a mindless idiot who couldn't design anything customers would actually buy. No that isn't true, but it doesn't matter because a critical mass believes it to be true and will act on that belief. And because Apple is valued as if it were true, without Steve at the helm the stock will correct to a more sensible valuation, wiping out tens of billions of paper wealth overnight and might set off a panic in the wider markets. Yes Apple has sales and some insanely great profit margins. But enough to justify their market cap? When they have no assets except current sales, goodwill and Steve on their balance sheet? They have zero plant & equipment as they outsource 100% of manufacturing to China. They have some (probably leased) office space here in the US and some developers, marketing folks and such.
But the market believes they are more valuable than every other mega corp with the exception of Exxon-Mobil? Really? We have seen this movie before when Amazon was valued higher than Boeing. Back when Pets.com had a big market cap and venture capitalists were falling over themselves to get in on drkoop.com. We know know how the story ends.
> but what's that got to do with Linux?
I don't know anything about the state of Apple support since I don't own one. But as a Linux user I do know all HP products are fully supported there. So I am implying that if one connects the dots that Apple's platform is probably supported as well since both use cups and there are a heck of a lot more Macs in the field than Linux desktops. Just ain't going to make the claim for certain since I'd be talking outta my butt.
And I'd actually buy HP products because of their explicit, well done and long term support if the cost of ownership weren't so damned high. So instead I tend toward Oki. Make sure you get one with Postscript and toner and drum unit sold as separate items and you get a great printing experience under Linux plus a lot lower price per page. If your distro doesn't support it out of the box there will be a PPD on the driver cd.
That would be stupid and fatal long term. We would never again see Linux lead the way anywhere if we hitched ourselves to Microsoft's trailer hitch. All this new push to ARM would have never been possible had not Linux lead the way there and created a potential market large enough to get Microsoft to follow. Your idea would have forever tied us to x86.
NVidia has a top tier 3D driver now because high dollar workstation users these days use Linux instead of legacy UNIX. That means there is money in keeping their drivers good enough to keep those super high margin cards moving out of their factory and not AMD/ATI's. But AMD wants in, not only there but on desktops and lacking the development resources are instead opening the specs. So be patient and soon we will have two hight quality options. Intel is already supplying fair driver support but they just don't compete well on the hardware.
Had we somehow adopted the Microsoft driver model (heavy emphasis on the somehow) none of this progress would have happened.
> Apple had to make a completely new networked printing system which
> is only supported by a handful of HP printers.
That is just ignorant. Apple didn't create CUPS they adopted it then later bought the primary developer/custodian. And unless they have changed policy, all HP printing products are supported on Linux. Since Apple and most Linux distros use CUPS to print nowadays, connect the dots.
Google cares about having their browser run well on Linux because they intend it to run on Chrome OS. Mozilla doesn't really care about Linux support going all the way back to when they were Netscape. Linux/UNIX has never been a 1st class target, only a port with a 'couple guys' working on it.
Seriously, I bought Netscape 1.0 and the Linux binary wasn't even on the CD. Back then buying was the only way to get export prohibited crypto. When I asked them about it I got blown off. Some years they care a little more than that, others about that little. At all time they make it clear a hold up on a port won't slow down feature development on their primary platform. IE is getting hardware assist so Firefox WILL ship it before IE9 leaves bets. And that probably makes sense from their pov.
> and glaciers ... have retreated world-wide on average for many years.
Yes they have. And dumped out ancient settlements and cavemen as they retreated. Which I take to mean that those glaciers were smaller than they are now during the fairly short time humans (and close relations) have been wandering around. Thus I reason that they will probably be larger eventually.
> NASA is a research organization.
NASA is also an organization that continued to employ James Hansen after he was outted as a lying liar who lies a lot. Lies a lot about Global Warming in particular and is cited in the very article this slashdot thread is arguing about. NASA utterly depends on Congress for it's funding and the winning play is to go along with the "Settled Science". NASA is also an agency in search of a reason to exist, seeing as how they are pretty much out of the space business after the shuttle goes to the Smithsonian later this year.
> Sure, humans will survive, but civilisation as we know it certainly won't.
Oh bullcrap. We can build a city in a few years and if we had to abandon all of the coastal anthills and start over we would be able to build better ones this time. Most of Europe was flattened during WWII and look how fast they came back. Assuming AGW alarmists are right we would still have decades to calmly and slowly move to higher ground. Decades for farmers to shift their planting patterns.
> People move and get on with life. The world doesn't end.
Um, no they don't. An hour or so south of where I'm sitting is a town called Cameron, LA. It has been wiped from the map three times in the last century. After the third one did they get on the cluetrain and move inland a few miles? Oh Hell no, Uncle Sugar was there ladling out the cash so they are industriously at work building it back yet again as we speak. The odds of a fourth total wipeout (wipeout as in part of the bank's vault and part of City Hall left standing) before hitting the century mark from number one is way better than fifty-fifty.
Most of New Orleans is below sea level. Common sense would have dictated taking the opportunity offered by Katrina to relocate some of the more vulnerable sections. Did they? Oh Hell no.
Go up the Mississippi river and count the towns that flood every decade or so and then count the ones that have finally got the hint and relocated. When river traffic was a town's lifeblood it made sense to take the risk, but nowadays?