Who do you expect should fund these studies? Should the government foot the entire bill? Should the people that are opposed to GM foods be funding studies? (And if they did, and they agreed with your preconception that GM is bad, would you say that those studies should be suspect?)
Consider that if the truth exists, and if the truth can be discovered by consensus around many scientific studies, and the truth will favor one side of a controversial issue, can you ever trust that the truth was found if the party that would benefit had any hand in bringing that truth to light? If you believed something to be true, and figured that the only way to get others to accept that truth was to get a bunch of scientific studies to happen to bring that truth to light, would you not try to fund those studies?
I agree that skepticism is healthy, but you really need to be looking at the integrity of the group doing the studies, not just at who was paying them.
ends up on *your* dinner table with significant levels of herbicide residues in it.
Do you even know what an herbicide is? Do you have any idea how much herbicide you eat that is naturally produced by plants? Just because it's an herbicide does not mean it's toxic to animals. Also, you say "residues". Are you saying there is glyphosate on your food? Or, like, some calcium deposits from the water mixture used to spray it? That's a "residue", right? And what is a "significant level"? I assume you can't mean statistically significant to cause harm, because that would be a LOT of glyphosate. Could you please elaborate here and cite your sources?
Please stop assuming everything you read on the Internet is true, especially from sites already biased to your viewpoint.
You have a rather perverse view of science, I think. The scientific method is about finding truth, and being ruthlessly data-oriented as possible, precisely because people's "gut instincts" are often quite wrong. While the conclusions people draw from the scientific method are sometimes wrong (or, more commonly, not quite right enough, cf. Newton's Laws of Motion), these conclusions are still far more likely to hold true than asking someone what their "gut" tells them. While I'm sure there are isolated cases where the data says something that results in a wrong conclusion, while someone's "gut" turns out to be right, this does not mean the scientific method is flawed or should not be trusted.
People make the same arguments about vaccines. Despite having been proven safe in hundreds of studies, and despite the researcher that started the panic coming out and admitting he falsified all of his research, people still believe that vaccines are dangerous and still refuse to vaccinate their children. This attitude has significant costs to society. I suppose you're fine with all of this? You'd probably also be fine if companies kept labeling their products as not containing thimerosal, perpetuating the (completely wrong) fears and continuing to cost society?
I think it's absolute bullshit that a farmer can have his crop infested with Monsanto "product" from a neighboring farm, and then get sued when he uses it.
I believe you're referring to the Schmeiser case? I agree with most of your sentiment here, but Schmeiser wasn't exactly innocent of wrongdoing there. He discovered that some of his crop was resistant to herbicide (accidentally contaminated), harvested the seed from that crop, and kept it intentionally segregated. The following year he used that seed exclusively to plant 1000 acres. In other words, he intentionally exploited the herbicide resistance of the crop that he knew wasn't from his original seed, and probably suspected was Monsanto's. That's where the patent infringement comes in. I agree that patents for this type of thing are dubious, but that is a separate battle.
I don't mean to be taking sides with Monsanto here (I truly do despise them), but I do feel that people misunderstand what happened in this case.
if GM good are so good at growing and so effective, they should cost less than non GM counterpart.
They do. Don't confuse production costs (paid by the farmers) with prices (paid by the consumer). Prices will be as high as people are willing to pay, but you're right that they should slowly trend downward as competition among GM producers increases, but as far as competition between GM producers and non-GM producers, the price only needs to drop a little bit to start squeezing the non-GM producers out of business.
let the manufacturer decide if they want or not to put a GM/NON-GM sticker to justify premium/bargain price on products
Sure, but due to public fears about GM (rational or not), no one will label their product GM, while some will label non-GM. Those that label non-GM may not even believe that their foods are better, but they're happy profiting from that belief held by others.
To be honest, in my eyes, "organic" is just about on the same footing as "homeopathic" remedies are. Both are mostly scams preying on people that either don't understand the issues (and the concepts here are complex, so it's understandable that many don't), or believe everything they read on teh intarnets. These products exist chiefly because people (thus demand) behave (buy) irrationally, based on what feels right rather than what has been demonstrated to be right.
Maybe we need a statement on foods labeled "non-GM" that says something like, "non-GM foods have not been demonstrated to be any safer or healthier than GM foods." I'm sure it'll be as effective as the labeling on homeopathic remedies.
Murder isn't committed by a corporation, it's committed by a person. If a crime occurs, you should be able to identify the *person* that actually committed it, and send that person to jail.
In the case of things like bad DMCA takedown notices, the crime would be perjury and it would be attributed to the person that actually signed their name to the DMCA notice.
There's the possibility, though, that a corporation is pumping out hundreds of sketchy DMCA notices, that, individually, don't quite rise to the level of perjury, but as a whole, suggest a pattern of wrongdoing by the corporation. In that situation it makes sense to go after the corporation (financially or with an injunction) rather than the individuals.
I think a lot of people fail to realize that most of these "loopholes" were intentionally put into place, arguably for laudable reasons. Any time the government wants to create an incentive for businesses (or individuals) to do something, like buy a "clean" vehicle, or move jobs to your home town, they play with the tax code to give deductions that create that incentive. In that respect, those "loopholes" serve a perfectly legitimate purpose. If you were to wipe the slate clean and start over with a flat tax system today, how long do you think it would be before some new incentive was added to the system?
It means that the IRS has sufficient reason (or rather, an automated program inside the IRS has sufficient reason) to believe that Google may owe more money than they have paid
Nope. Audits aren't based on probable cause.
-jcr
Are you saying that audits of this type can be done randomly, or that when the OP said "sufficient reason" he meant "probable cause"?
And this gentleman was apparently in breach. I have not read the conditions of entry, but they may have included an agreement to surrender all "... equipment; film; and other media to Capital Shopping Centres Group PLC or its authorised agents" on breaching said condition.
Does this actually permit the security guard to compel you to surrender your camera? If I choose to keep my camera, I would think a court would be needed to enforce this aspect of the contract before anyone can take my camera without my permission.
Agreed. I have no problems if you want to put any sort of electronic or wireless system in my car, but it needs to be completely electrically isolated from the parts of my car that I need to drive. Assume that an attacker will pwn everything else, and can go so far as to manipulate power draw or create an electrical short. None of that should affect my ability to drive. If you want to send information like speed to the other systems, create a one way data path and use an optical connection.
I'm not seriously concerned about RC planes, but only because they stick to parks and you don't see them above 500' (you won't see me below 500' unless it's near an airport). Commercial RC planes are probably not going to be doing orbits around a public park at 500', so by their very nature their behavior is going to differ from what's been demonstrated to be fairly safe.
The reason flying through clouds is a non-issue is because (a) there exists equipment to make that safe; (b) ATC is there to ensure safety if the equipment is insufficient (either on my aircraft, or because an unequipped or malfunctioning aircraft is getting close to me and my correctly functioning equipment can't see them); and (c) there's a trained pilot behind the stick to deal with the unexpected. Show me an "RC plane" that can safely integrate with the other air traffic (e.g. ADS-B), coordinate with (follow instructions by) ATC, and fail safely in the event of an equipment problem, and I'll have no qualms about sharing airspace with it. We're not there yet. (But, I agree that that's the direction we're headed.)
Drones and planes can coexist under some reasonable rules.
So this I'm fine with and I agree.
private pilots that think they have the rights to the sky just because they got there first annoy the *** out of me.
But this I'm not. The difference between a hobbyist RC/drone guy and an actual pilot is that if a collision occurs, the hobbyist will lose their RC plane while the pilot and his or her passengers (family?) will die. IMO, pilots are quite justified in being frightened of drones/RC planes appearing anywhere other than where they are expected (e.g. parks, below 500'). If we want drones or autonomous aircraft sharing "real" airspace, we need lots more rules/regulations/enforcement, and I think it's reasonable for the bulk of that burden to be on the hobbyist, sorry. But like you say, new technologies like ADS-B might be the bulk of that.
Because Microsoft's revenue stream depends on businesses "playing it safe" with Microsoft products. Those types of decisions are usually made by MBAs, and MBA's love to "manage" things. If some new product lets them "manage" something, it's like porn to them.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
You can't compare government spending with spending of the average American. But you can sort of draw an analogy to upper-middle-class savings:
What do you do with the money in your (long-term) savings? Typically you want to invest it, to make a return on it. In other words, put the money to work, so that you're earning more on those investments than (hopefully) interest in a savings account, or inflation. If you have $50k of free cash in the bank, and you decide you want to buy a car and they offer you 0% financing, what do you do? You finance, of course, so that you're continuing to earn a return on that cash rather than see it disappear just so that you can own your car outright on day 1.
Similarly, it frequently makes perfect sense for a government to spend into the red if it means they're spending to improve infrastructure, or otherwise promote the economy. This is just another type of investment. The assumption/expectation is that the interest the government is paying on the loans needed to do that deficit spending is less than the value created by spending that money early. So in theory, deficit spending can actually be a great thing. Unfortunately, we have politicians making these judgment calls based on politics, not sound financial reasoning, and that's where the whole thing starts to break down a bit.
It's easy to come up with specific cases/searches that this won't be useful for. (Porn would be a whole class of its own.) For someone that doesn't participate in social networks, only performs very targeted searches, and is never influenced by the recommendations of people in his or her social circles, it doesn't sound like this feature is going to provide that person much value. I rather suspect, though, that people in this category are a minority. Lots of people participate in social networks. Lots people perform very general searches (like product recommendations). LOTS of people are indeed influenced by the recommendations of their friends (even if the recommendation has to be filtered by who the recommendation is coming from, and the nature of the recommendation). It seems like this has value for some people, IMO.
You are mistaken. DNSSEC relies on each level of the DNS hierarchy vouching for the keys used to sign records in the child zone. The root zone signs keys for com, and com signs records for example.com, including the keys used by example.com to sign www.example.com. If the keeper of com believes the domain has rightfully changed hands (or maybe an attacker figures out your password), new DNSSEC keys can be provided and the com zone will dutifully sign them, effectively transferring DNSSEC-provable ownership to someone else.
I think that the idea of what pages are "better" is frequently subjective. People pay attention to the recommendations of their friends, and this is a way of letting you express those recommendations directly in Google search results, and affect the results of your friends. IMO, this seems completely orthogonal to the issue of search spam, except that both relate to search quality.
Social networks allow people to express a social connection with someone else. If you participated in such a social network, and clicked +1 on a link in a Google search result, and one of your social connections did a search that happened to display that same link, they would see that you +1'd it (and therefore recommend it), making it more likely that your "friend" will pay closer attention to it than other results on the page.
True enough for the most part. However, it can be an actually trusted 3rd party rather than one of dozens of companies I've never heard of in countries whose governments I don't trust.
Yes, but you're still only applying that to the second-level domain. If I were to register ebay-payments-this-is-real.com, and the.com registry says my real-world identity is "Scammer", that's great. But we're delegating trust, couldn't I just create a "no-really.ebay-payments-this-is-real.com" and say that its real-world identity is "eBay"? You'd have to create a whole new system that establishes the top-level domains and which levels are authorized to make assertions about real-world identity. If I were an ISP and wanted to give out domains of the form joes-widgets.example.com, do all of my customers' SSL certificates have to say "Example, Inc."?
Though, don't get me wrong: I'm all for having government entities establish identity, but IMO the issue of authenticating real-world identities is somewhat orthogonal to authenticating DNS "identities" (i.e. SSL public keys).
All I need to know is that the cert matches the fingerprint printed on my bank statement and available at the local branch on the online banking brochure.
Sure, that makes a lot of sense. But is it practical to expect your customers to manually inspect cert fingerprints? People click through cert warnings ("I don't care, just show me the damn page") all the time without realizing the implications. I think this would be a step backward.
"Have I seen this cert before" is already a feature of most major web browsers, it's just not obvious when this is or is not the case, so I don't know how useful it is in its current form.
Except you can't meaningfully have real-world identity validation without trusted third parties. The guy owning ebay-payments-this-is-real.com can generate a cert for his web server that says "eBay", but you can't trust such an assertion if the only trust you have is the DNS hierarchy.
Spoofing a domain is effectively impossible, but hijacking it is not. If you can convince the registrar that you are the owner of the domain, you can change the DNS servers *and* the domain's DS records.
I'd guess that most porn sites are in the USA and northwestern Europe (the Danish and Germans seem to have a lot of porn), so as long as those places don't pass any such laws, it doesn't matter.
Allow me to complete some of your sentences for you:
Puzzle me this, if only radioactive noble gasses were emitted, why did the Ronald Reagan have to move even though it is miles off shore
"...because the only reason an aircraft carrier would move in this situation is if the radiation posed an immediate deadly risk, and not as any sort of precautionary measure."
Why was there a spike of radioactivity in Tokyo, a couple hundred miles away -- are the winds really traveling 240km per couple minutes...
"...because sensors for detecting radiation only detect deadly levels, and there's no way this signal means that the levels detected might be harmless."
What about the breach in in the containment of reactor two?
"...because everyone knows that when you put 'breach' and 'containment' in the same sentence, that means Chernobyl!"
And since you're having this discussion in the context of safety of nuclear power generation, have you stopped to look at what's happened with Japan's non-nuclear power generation facilities? How do you think the US's coal power system would fare? Have you looked at newer nuclear power technologies (e.g. Thorium)?
Slashdot Mirror
Who do you expect should fund these studies? Should the government foot the entire bill? Should the people that are opposed to GM foods be funding studies? (And if they did, and they agreed with your preconception that GM is bad, would you say that those studies should be suspect?)
Consider that if the truth exists, and if the truth can be discovered by consensus around many scientific studies, and the truth will favor one side of a controversial issue, can you ever trust that the truth was found if the party that would benefit had any hand in bringing that truth to light? If you believed something to be true, and figured that the only way to get others to accept that truth was to get a bunch of scientific studies to happen to bring that truth to light, would you not try to fund those studies?
I agree that skepticism is healthy, but you really need to be looking at the integrity of the group doing the studies, not just at who was paying them.
ROUNDUP, a carcinogenic herbicide.
Citation needed. The EPA would disagree with you: http://www.epa.gov/oppsrrd1/REDs/factsheets/0178fact.pdf
ends up on *your* dinner table with significant levels of herbicide residues in it.
Do you even know what an herbicide is? Do you have any idea how much herbicide you eat that is naturally produced by plants? Just because it's an herbicide does not mean it's toxic to animals. Also, you say "residues". Are you saying there is glyphosate on your food? Or, like, some calcium deposits from the water mixture used to spray it? That's a "residue", right? And what is a "significant level"? I assume you can't mean statistically significant to cause harm, because that would be a LOT of glyphosate. Could you please elaborate here and cite your sources?
Please stop assuming everything you read on the Internet is true, especially from sites already biased to your viewpoint.
You have a rather perverse view of science, I think. The scientific method is about finding truth, and being ruthlessly data-oriented as possible, precisely because people's "gut instincts" are often quite wrong. While the conclusions people draw from the scientific method are sometimes wrong (or, more commonly, not quite right enough, cf. Newton's Laws of Motion), these conclusions are still far more likely to hold true than asking someone what their "gut" tells them. While I'm sure there are isolated cases where the data says something that results in a wrong conclusion, while someone's "gut" turns out to be right, this does not mean the scientific method is flawed or should not be trusted.
People make the same arguments about vaccines. Despite having been proven safe in hundreds of studies, and despite the researcher that started the panic coming out and admitting he falsified all of his research, people still believe that vaccines are dangerous and still refuse to vaccinate their children. This attitude has significant costs to society. I suppose you're fine with all of this? You'd probably also be fine if companies kept labeling their products as not containing thimerosal, perpetuating the (completely wrong) fears and continuing to cost society?
I think it's absolute bullshit that a farmer can have his crop infested with Monsanto "product" from a neighboring farm, and then get sued when he uses it.
I believe you're referring to the Schmeiser case? I agree with most of your sentiment here, but Schmeiser wasn't exactly innocent of wrongdoing there. He discovered that some of his crop was resistant to herbicide (accidentally contaminated), harvested the seed from that crop, and kept it intentionally segregated. The following year he used that seed exclusively to plant 1000 acres. In other words, he intentionally exploited the herbicide resistance of the crop that he knew wasn't from his original seed, and probably suspected was Monsanto's. That's where the patent infringement comes in. I agree that patents for this type of thing are dubious, but that is a separate battle.
I don't mean to be taking sides with Monsanto here (I truly do despise them), but I do feel that people misunderstand what happened in this case.
if GM good are so good at growing and so effective, they should cost less than non GM counterpart.
They do. Don't confuse production costs (paid by the farmers) with prices (paid by the consumer). Prices will be as high as people are willing to pay, but you're right that they should slowly trend downward as competition among GM producers increases, but as far as competition between GM producers and non-GM producers, the price only needs to drop a little bit to start squeezing the non-GM producers out of business.
let the manufacturer decide if they want or not to put a GM/NON-GM sticker to justify premium/bargain price on products
Sure, but due to public fears about GM (rational or not), no one will label their product GM, while some will label non-GM. Those that label non-GM may not even believe that their foods are better, but they're happy profiting from that belief held by others.
To be honest, in my eyes, "organic" is just about on the same footing as "homeopathic" remedies are. Both are mostly scams preying on people that either don't understand the issues (and the concepts here are complex, so it's understandable that many don't), or believe everything they read on teh intarnets. These products exist chiefly because people (thus demand) behave (buy) irrationally, based on what feels right rather than what has been demonstrated to be right.
Maybe we need a statement on foods labeled "non-GM" that says something like, "non-GM foods have not been demonstrated to be any safer or healthier than GM foods." I'm sure it'll be as effective as the labeling on homeopathic remedies.
Murder isn't committed by a corporation, it's committed by a person. If a crime occurs, you should be able to identify the *person* that actually committed it, and send that person to jail.
In the case of things like bad DMCA takedown notices, the crime would be perjury and it would be attributed to the person that actually signed their name to the DMCA notice.
There's the possibility, though, that a corporation is pumping out hundreds of sketchy DMCA notices, that, individually, don't quite rise to the level of perjury, but as a whole, suggest a pattern of wrongdoing by the corporation. In that situation it makes sense to go after the corporation (financially or with an injunction) rather than the individuals.
I think a lot of people fail to realize that most of these "loopholes" were intentionally put into place, arguably for laudable reasons. Any time the government wants to create an incentive for businesses (or individuals) to do something, like buy a "clean" vehicle, or move jobs to your home town, they play with the tax code to give deductions that create that incentive. In that respect, those "loopholes" serve a perfectly legitimate purpose. If you were to wipe the slate clean and start over with a flat tax system today, how long do you think it would be before some new incentive was added to the system?
It means that the IRS has sufficient reason (or rather, an automated program inside the IRS has sufficient reason) to believe that Google may owe more money than they have paid
Nope. Audits aren't based on probable cause.
-jcr
Are you saying that audits of this type can be done randomly, or that when the OP said "sufficient reason" he meant "probable cause"?
Does this actually permit the security guard to compel you to surrender your camera? If I choose to keep my camera, I would think a court would be needed to enforce this aspect of the contract before anyone can take my camera without my permission.
Agreed. I have no problems if you want to put any sort of electronic or wireless system in my car, but it needs to be completely electrically isolated from the parts of my car that I need to drive. Assume that an attacker will pwn everything else, and can go so far as to manipulate power draw or create an electrical short. None of that should affect my ability to drive. If you want to send information like speed to the other systems, create a one way data path and use an optical connection.
I'm not seriously concerned about RC planes, but only because they stick to parks and you don't see them above 500' (you won't see me below 500' unless it's near an airport). Commercial RC planes are probably not going to be doing orbits around a public park at 500', so by their very nature their behavior is going to differ from what's been demonstrated to be fairly safe.
The reason flying through clouds is a non-issue is because (a) there exists equipment to make that safe; (b) ATC is there to ensure safety if the equipment is insufficient (either on my aircraft, or because an unequipped or malfunctioning aircraft is getting close to me and my correctly functioning equipment can't see them); and (c) there's a trained pilot behind the stick to deal with the unexpected. Show me an "RC plane" that can safely integrate with the other air traffic (e.g. ADS-B), coordinate with (follow instructions by) ATC, and fail safely in the event of an equipment problem, and I'll have no qualms about sharing airspace with it. We're not there yet. (But, I agree that that's the direction we're headed.)
Drones and planes can coexist under some reasonable rules.
So this I'm fine with and I agree.
private pilots that think they have the rights to the sky just because they got there first annoy the *** out of me.
But this I'm not. The difference between a hobbyist RC/drone guy and an actual pilot is that if a collision occurs, the hobbyist will lose their RC plane while the pilot and his or her passengers (family?) will die. IMO, pilots are quite justified in being frightened of drones/RC planes appearing anywhere other than where they are expected (e.g. parks, below 500'). If we want drones or autonomous aircraft sharing "real" airspace, we need lots more rules/regulations/enforcement, and I think it's reasonable for the bulk of that burden to be on the hobbyist, sorry. But like you say, new technologies like ADS-B might be the bulk of that.
Because Microsoft's revenue stream depends on businesses "playing it safe" with Microsoft products. Those types of decisions are usually made by MBAs, and MBA's love to "manage" things. If some new product lets them "manage" something, it's like porn to them.
You can't compare government spending with spending of the average American. But you can sort of draw an analogy to upper-middle-class savings:
What do you do with the money in your (long-term) savings? Typically you want to invest it, to make a return on it. In other words, put the money to work, so that you're earning more on those investments than (hopefully) interest in a savings account, or inflation. If you have $50k of free cash in the bank, and you decide you want to buy a car and they offer you 0% financing, what do you do? You finance, of course, so that you're continuing to earn a return on that cash rather than see it disappear just so that you can own your car outright on day 1.
Similarly, it frequently makes perfect sense for a government to spend into the red if it means they're spending to improve infrastructure, or otherwise promote the economy. This is just another type of investment. The assumption/expectation is that the interest the government is paying on the loans needed to do that deficit spending is less than the value created by spending that money early. So in theory, deficit spending can actually be a great thing. Unfortunately, we have politicians making these judgment calls based on politics, not sound financial reasoning, and that's where the whole thing starts to break down a bit.
How would a cookie "opted_out=true" be used to track you, unless you were the only one that opted out?
It does tell you who it's from. "So-and-so +1'd this" or "So-and-so shared this on Twitter."
It's easy to come up with specific cases/searches that this won't be useful for. (Porn would be a whole class of its own.) For someone that doesn't participate in social networks, only performs very targeted searches, and is never influenced by the recommendations of people in his or her social circles, it doesn't sound like this feature is going to provide that person much value. I rather suspect, though, that people in this category are a minority. Lots of people participate in social networks. Lots people perform very general searches (like product recommendations). LOTS of people are indeed influenced by the recommendations of their friends (even if the recommendation has to be filtered by who the recommendation is coming from, and the nature of the recommendation). It seems like this has value for some people, IMO.
You are mistaken. DNSSEC relies on each level of the DNS hierarchy vouching for the keys used to sign records in the child zone. The root zone signs keys for com, and com signs records for example.com, including the keys used by example.com to sign www.example.com. If the keeper of com believes the domain has rightfully changed hands (or maybe an attacker figures out your password), new DNSSEC keys can be provided and the com zone will dutifully sign them, effectively transferring DNSSEC-provable ownership to someone else.
I think that the idea of what pages are "better" is frequently subjective. People pay attention to the recommendations of their friends, and this is a way of letting you express those recommendations directly in Google search results, and affect the results of your friends. IMO, this seems completely orthogonal to the issue of search spam, except that both relate to search quality.
Social networks allow people to express a social connection with someone else. If you participated in such a social network, and clicked +1 on a link in a Google search result, and one of your social connections did a search that happened to display that same link, they would see that you +1'd it (and therefore recommend it), making it more likely that your "friend" will pay closer attention to it than other results on the page.
True enough for the most part. However, it can be an actually trusted 3rd party rather than one of dozens of companies I've never heard of in countries whose governments I don't trust.
Yes, but you're still only applying that to the second-level domain. If I were to register ebay-payments-this-is-real.com, and the .com registry says my real-world identity is "Scammer", that's great. But we're delegating trust, couldn't I just create a "no-really.ebay-payments-this-is-real.com" and say that its real-world identity is "eBay"? You'd have to create a whole new system that establishes the top-level domains and which levels are authorized to make assertions about real-world identity. If I were an ISP and wanted to give out domains of the form joes-widgets.example.com, do all of my customers' SSL certificates have to say "Example, Inc."?
Though, don't get me wrong: I'm all for having government entities establish identity, but IMO the issue of authenticating real-world identities is somewhat orthogonal to authenticating DNS "identities" (i.e. SSL public keys).
All I need to know is that the cert matches the fingerprint printed on my bank statement and available at the local branch on the online banking brochure.
Sure, that makes a lot of sense. But is it practical to expect your customers to manually inspect cert fingerprints? People click through cert warnings ("I don't care, just show me the damn page") all the time without realizing the implications. I think this would be a step backward.
"Have I seen this cert before" is already a feature of most major web browsers, it's just not obvious when this is or is not the case, so I don't know how useful it is in its current form.
Except you can't meaningfully have real-world identity validation without trusted third parties. The guy owning ebay-payments-this-is-real.com can generate a cert for his web server that says "eBay", but you can't trust such an assertion if the only trust you have is the DNS hierarchy.
Spoofing a domain is effectively impossible, but hijacking it is not. If you can convince the registrar that you are the owner of the domain, you can change the DNS servers *and* the domain's DS records.
I'd guess that most porn sites are in the USA and northwestern Europe (the Danish and Germans seem to have a lot of porn), so as long as those places don't pass any such laws, it doesn't matter.
OK, whew. That'll never happen.
Allow me to complete some of your sentences for you:
Puzzle me this, if only radioactive noble gasses were emitted, why did the Ronald Reagan have to move even though it is miles off shore
"...because the only reason an aircraft carrier would move in this situation is if the radiation posed an immediate deadly risk, and not as any sort of precautionary measure."
Why was there a spike of radioactivity in Tokyo, a couple hundred miles away -- are the winds really traveling 240km per couple minutes...
"...because sensors for detecting radiation only detect deadly levels, and there's no way this signal means that the levels detected might be harmless."
What about the breach in in the containment of reactor two?
"...because everyone knows that when you put 'breach' and 'containment' in the same sentence, that means Chernobyl!"
And since you're having this discussion in the context of safety of nuclear power generation, have you stopped to look at what's happened with Japan's non-nuclear power generation facilities? How do you think the US's coal power system would fare? Have you looked at newer nuclear power technologies (e.g. Thorium)?