Not the mayor, the manager...who was appointed by the state governor, and ignored all warnings that this was endangering people.
I believe that there is sufficient evidence that both the appointed manager and the state governor should be put in prison from wanton endangerment and inentional poisoning. I'm not quite sure what the legal terms for that are, since you probably couldn't prove any intent to harm, just a decision to do the not care about the harm.
I just noticed a point of possible confusion (as it was confused in the post to which I am replying, so let me rephrase:
If you buy something that works on one version of an iPad or Android, it's quite likely to work on another.
to
If you buy something that works on one version of an iPad it's quite likely to work on another version of an iPad, and if you buy something that works on one version of an Android it's quite likely to work on another version of an Android.
Excuse me, "open source Andriod tablet"? Perhaps you need to check the definition of "open source". And in any case, the comparison we're looking for is jelly bean vs. honeycomb (or whatever the versions were being named), If you buy something that works on one version of an iPad or Android, it's quite likely to work on another. This despite the fact that neither of them are open source.
OTOH, where open source would actually come in was if you wanted to port an application from an iPod to an Android. If it were open source, it's quite plausible that someone would have already done it, so you wouldn't need to, but you could (in principle) do it yourself. In fact you could port it to run on MSWind or BSD or Linux. Some of them would require a lot more effort, however, and often a phone app had no value on a desktop, so it's quite likely that nobody else would have bothered to do so.
OK. Thank you, after reading your Bartles, after reading your replies and the other comments I understand the point you were making.
I'm afraid I still tend to accept the statements of the NOAA and NASA about temperature. And I acknowledge this is taking the word of an expert in an area where I know myself to be incompetent. I do that frequently...but it's also true that there are experts I don't trust, and your reasons for not trusting them don't seem irrational. I merely guess that they are incorrect.
E,g., if a certain weather station has been located next to a heat source for a long time, then it's local deviation should already have been factored into the on-going estimate, and if it's new it should undergo a period of validation. The existence of "heat islands" of various sizes is a well known effect. So I'm believing that they have already corrected for the effect that you are using as an example of why it is unreliable. But I know I could be wrong.
There's a fair amount of evidence that the official projections are intentionally filtered to avoid the more alarming scenarios that the scientists are actually projecting. Some of those scenarios *are* rather improbable, but the improbable scenarios that are ameliorative aren't being filtered out.
"and there isn't enough fossil fuel left to get us much over that."????? Are you insane? We're quite likely to go over +2 even were we to try as hard as we can manage to avoid it. I suspect that we're already committed to +2 C just from the fossil fuels we've already burned.
And I'm not sure of your source that "IPCC says anything up to +2 is on average beneficial for mankind". I haven't encountered that anywhere I've looked. I'm not even sure it would be beneficial in areas where people would be more comfortable were it warmer, because the change in temperature also means change in precipitation patterns, meaning unexpected droughts, floods, etc. Meaning massive crop failures. Making massive starvation probable. (It was crop failures that triggered the Arab Spring, which set the ground for ISIS. Yes, there were lots of other reasons, but crop failures were the trigger.)
P.S.: The IPCC may really have said that. Their report was a document that was intentionally non-alarmist, and they threw out all the more alarming forecasts. (Well, many of them were really extreme. It's quite unlikely that West Antarctica will soon melt. But they threw them out for being politically unacceptable.)
That's actually not an exceptionally good argument, because the heat cycle has lots of feedback loops with lots of build-in delay loops and both positive and negative feedback controls. Which is why it's so hard to understand.
I agree with you that he's wrong, but even were he right, it would still mean that we needed to stop doing the things that pushed the temperature higher...which he doesn't seem to realize.
This is a serious problem, that nobody's figured out how to properly address. (Scorn doesn't work.)
People have a hard time believing climate predictions that run contrary to their current weather experience. A large part of this is the innate tendency of people to minimize both future gains and future costs. So they won't work now either to acquire a future benefit or to avoid a future loss. This is a readily measurable effect, not a theory. Any explanation of it would be a theory, but I don't have a useful theory. (A useful theory would be one that told how to overcome the effect.)
Your being moderated a troll is probably accurate, but the point you raise is real. And so is the problem it points at.
I had a friend who took astrology quite seriously. He wrote a computer program to compute his horoscope, and then started customizing it by adding in asteroids so he could figure out their influence. I think he ended up with over 100 variables, which meant about 100 factorial relationships.
It was naturally impossible to prove him wrong. But he did get a job as a programmer.
This isn't heavy enough to have been the hypothesized Nemesis. It's also too close.
IIRC, calculations indicated that Nemesis would need to be a brown dwarf and to be about half a light year out. (I actually remember further, but I can't believe it, so I shortened the distance to something that felt reasonable, and "sounded" about like the distance I remembered, even if it wasn't the same magnitude.)
The memory I'm rejecting had Nemesis being a distant binary companion to the sun that was about 5 light years away. That's further than Alpha Centauri, but Alpha and Proxima Centauri have different orbital velocities which mean they are not in a stable relationship with the sun.
Well, honestly, different people had different ideas as to what Nemesis might be, but I don't think any of them were as light as Neptune.
Copyright is good law. Current copyright law is bad law.
The purpose of copyright law is to get more works into the public domain. When it fails at that, then it needs to be not just repealed, but declared invalid from the beginning. And DRM is the exact antithesis of anything that should be supported by copyright law.
You have good points, but they do not justify DRM. DRM is only there because of rent-seeking, and any company that uses it deserves to fail. Perhaps they won't, we've got a pretty corrupt legal code, but they deserve to.
Everything you say is true until the artificially created monopoly starts engaging in rent-seeking. Then all the "advantages" turn into "Chinese thumb-traps".
The approach you outline is fine as long as the engineers are in charge. It gets dubious when the engineers are replaced by entrepreneurs. It gets down-right foul when the accountants take control. HP is a classic example of the process, even though they didn't have DRM to enforce their monopoly.
There's something really wrong about the way business law is structured that excellent engineering companies are repeatedly driven into the ground first by marketing and then by penny-pinching.
IIRC there are certain parts of the phone that it is illegal to make open source. I don't know why, as the excuses I've heard are not believable. I can see reason to make, e.g., frequency selection, read only, but no reason to require that they be closed source.
IIRC the RCA 3 computer was twice as fast as the RCA 2, but one could be upgraded to the other for a fee. If you paid the fee a serviceman can out an removed a long cable and replaced it with a short one.
I think that those were the last models of RCA computer, certainly they were the last I encountered.
I agree that the police should have input into what can be released, but they should not have control. That should be in the hands of a totally separate agency, with it's on decision power. And if the police don't like the decision they should be able to appeal it to a court. As should the requesting party.
No, I didn't miss the part where you mentioned review boards. If the review board were to be totally independent of the police, to the extent of being totally separately funded, and if there were a valid custodial chain from the instant the film was shot until it was delivered, then I would consider that sufficient.
Police should be able to argue reasons before the review board, but they should not be on it. I wouldn't trust any part of the adversarial process as it has frequently been shown to be strongly tilted into accepting the word of the police in the teeth of the evidence. An I include judges in the adversarial process. I only include defense attorneys that aren't public defenders in the interest of symmetry, as they show a bias in the other direction. Thus, totally independent. Few review boards that I'm aware of meet that description, and the ones that do are generally too poorly funded and depend on volunteer support, which is not sufficient to ensure proper custodial care.
In fact, I'd probably want this system to be run by historians or librarians, and they tend to extend proper regard to care for records. (And the librarians that I'm thinking of are the ones that operate rare book rooms, not the ones that encourage lending out sole copies of out-of-print books.)
You don't build habitable shells, you build cellular tubes. The suggestion I saw was a mile in diameter, rotating for gravity, and long. The cells connect into strands, but can be sealed off separately so that, among other reasons, you can have vacuum physics labs. You build lots and lots of strands at slightly different orbital heights and slightly different angles, so they interfere minimally with each other's solar panel wings. Each cell would effectively be a city. Or town with fields, or game preserve, or agricultural land. Etc. Each cell would have independent motive power, though not much. Probably ion rockets, because mass would be precious. And each cell could, in principle, attach itself to any other selected strand, though orbital energetic requirements would make doing that frequently, or to distant strands, problematic.
You won't get enough mass that way to build a Dyson Sphere, or anything even approximately similar. You could build several kinds of "starter sets", but you probably couldn't even get enough mass for a real Dyson Sphere even by disassembling the planets. (You might be able to build something as thin as a light sail, but how would you hold it in place. Besides, that would emit infrared radiation that wasn't detected. So you need something substantial enough to support nano-scale heat scavengers that reduce the frequency to down below the range that we were observing in. And those take mass too, because each one needs a cold radiator.)
Now somewhere I read that this was a trinary system, so perhaps if you disassembled the mass of all planets around 3 stars you'd have enough mass.
If they had an FTL drive, they'd be unlikely to build a Dyson Sphere, or anything that could be mistaken for one. (Unless they're all so addicted to video games that nobody want to have the lag of moving further from the server.)
Slashdot Mirror
Not the mayor, the manager...who was appointed by the state governor, and ignored all warnings that this was endangering people.
I believe that there is sufficient evidence that both the appointed manager and the state governor should be put in prison from wanton endangerment and inentional poisoning. I'm not quite sure what the legal terms for that are, since you probably couldn't prove any intent to harm, just a decision to do the not care about the harm.
I just noticed a point of possible confusion (as it was confused in the post to which I am replying, so let me rephrase:
to
Excuse me, "open source Andriod tablet"? Perhaps you need to check the definition of "open source". And in any case, the comparison we're looking for is jelly bean vs. honeycomb (or whatever the versions were being named), If you buy something that works on one version of an iPad or Android, it's quite likely to work on another. This despite the fact that neither of them are open source.
OTOH, where open source would actually come in was if you wanted to port an application from an iPod to an Android. If it were open source, it's quite plausible that someone would have already done it, so you wouldn't need to, but you could (in principle) do it yourself. In fact you could port it to run on MSWind or BSD or Linux. Some of them would require a lot more effort, however, and often a phone app had no value on a desktop, so it's quite likely that nobody else would have bothered to do so.
OK. Thank you, after reading your Bartles, after reading your replies and the other comments I understand the point you were making.
I'm afraid I still tend to accept the statements of the NOAA and NASA about temperature. And I acknowledge this is taking the word of an expert in an area where I know myself to be incompetent. I do that frequently...but it's also true that there are experts I don't trust, and your reasons for not trusting them don't seem irrational. I merely guess that they are incorrect.
E,g., if a certain weather station has been located next to a heat source for a long time, then it's local deviation should already have been factored into the on-going estimate, and if it's new it should undergo a period of validation. The existence of "heat islands" of various sizes is a well known effect. So I'm believing that they have already corrected for the effect that you are using as an example of why it is unreliable. But I know I could be wrong.
There's a fair amount of evidence that the official projections are intentionally filtered to avoid the more alarming scenarios that the scientists are actually projecting. Some of those scenarios *are* rather improbable, but the improbable scenarios that are ameliorative aren't being filtered out.
"and there isn't enough fossil fuel left to get us much over that."?????
Are you insane? We're quite likely to go over +2 even were we to try as hard as we can manage to avoid it. I suspect that we're already committed to +2 C just from the fossil fuels we've already burned.
And I'm not sure of your source that "IPCC says anything up to +2 is on average beneficial for mankind". I haven't encountered that anywhere I've looked. I'm not even sure it would be beneficial in areas where people would be more comfortable were it warmer, because the change in temperature also means change in precipitation patterns, meaning unexpected droughts, floods, etc. Meaning massive crop failures. Making massive starvation probable. (It was crop failures that triggered the Arab Spring, which set the ground for ISIS. Yes, there were lots of other reasons, but crop failures were the trigger.)
P.S.: The IPCC may really have said that. Their report was a document that was intentionally non-alarmist, and they threw out all the more alarming forecasts. (Well, many of them were really extreme. It's quite unlikely that West Antarctica will soon melt. But they threw them out for being politically unacceptable.)
Without explanation, I have no trouble accepting both images as accurate, and neither as implying anything in particular about the story.
Would you care to explain? (Neither of those links was in the summary, and the summary linked to more than one additional web page.)
That's actually not an exceptionally good argument, because the heat cycle has lots of feedback loops with lots of build-in delay loops and both positive and negative feedback controls. Which is why it's so hard to understand.
I agree with you that he's wrong, but even were he right, it would still mean that we needed to stop doing the things that pushed the temperature higher...which he doesn't seem to realize.
This is a serious problem, that nobody's figured out how to properly address. (Scorn doesn't work.)
People have a hard time believing climate predictions that run contrary to their current weather experience. A large part of this is the innate tendency of people to minimize both future gains and future costs. So they won't work now either to acquire a future benefit or to avoid a future loss. This is a readily measurable effect, not a theory. Any explanation of it would be a theory, but I don't have a useful theory. (A useful theory would be one that told how to overcome the effect.)
Your being moderated a troll is probably accurate, but the point you raise is real. And so is the problem it points at.
I had a friend who took astrology quite seriously. He wrote a computer program to compute his horoscope, and then started customizing it by adding in asteroids so he could figure out their influence. I think he ended up with over 100 variables, which meant about 100 factorial relationships.
It was naturally impossible to prove him wrong. But he did get a job as a programmer.
This isn't heavy enough to have been the hypothesized Nemesis. It's also too close.
IIRC, calculations indicated that Nemesis would need to be a brown dwarf and to be about half a light year out. (I actually remember further, but I can't believe it, so I shortened the distance to something that felt reasonable, and "sounded" about like the distance I remembered, even if it wasn't the same magnitude.)
The memory I'm rejecting had Nemesis being a distant binary companion to the sun that was about 5 light years away. That's further than Alpha Centauri, but Alpha and Proxima Centauri have different orbital velocities which mean they are not in a stable relationship with the sun.
Well, honestly, different people had different ideas as to what Nemesis might be, but I don't think any of them were as light as Neptune.
That could have interesting repercussions. Sounds like they would be good ones, too.
Copyright is good law. Current copyright law is bad law.
The purpose of copyright law is to get more works into the public domain. When it fails at that, then it needs to be not just repealed, but declared invalid from the beginning. And DRM is the exact antithesis of anything that should be supported by copyright law.
You have good points, but they do not justify DRM. DRM is only there because of rent-seeking, and any company that uses it deserves to fail. Perhaps they won't, we've got a pretty corrupt legal code, but they deserve to.
Everything you say is true until the artificially created monopoly starts engaging in rent-seeking. Then all the "advantages" turn into "Chinese thumb-traps".
The approach you outline is fine as long as the engineers are in charge. It gets dubious when the engineers are replaced by entrepreneurs. It gets down-right foul when the accountants take control. HP is a classic example of the process, even though they didn't have DRM to enforce their monopoly.
There's something really wrong about the way business law is structured that excellent engineering companies are repeatedly driven into the ground first by marketing and then by penny-pinching.
IIRC there are certain parts of the phone that it is illegal to make open source. I don't know why, as the excuses I've heard are not believable. I can see reason to make, e.g., frequency selection, read only, but no reason to require that they be closed source.
So perhaps I'm wrong.
IIRC the RCA 3 computer was twice as fast as the RCA 2, but one could be upgraded to the other for a fee. If you paid the fee a serviceman can out an removed a long cable and replaced it with a short one.
I think that those were the last models of RCA computer, certainly they were the last I encountered.
And if you don't know what a merkin is, look it up. https://www.google.com/search?...
My preference is U.Statians. (Pronounced eustachians.)
I agree that the police should have input into what can be released, but they should not have control. That should be in the hands of a totally separate agency, with it's on decision power. And if the police don't like the decision they should be able to appeal it to a court. As should the requesting party.
Perhaps $200 is reasonable.
No, I didn't miss the part where you mentioned review boards. If the review board were to be totally independent of the police, to the extent of being totally separately funded, and if there were a valid custodial chain from the instant the film was shot until it was delivered, then I would consider that sufficient.
Police should be able to argue reasons before the review board, but they should not be on it. I wouldn't trust any part of the adversarial process as it has frequently been shown to be strongly tilted into accepting the word of the police in the teeth of the evidence. An I include judges in the adversarial process. I only include defense attorneys that aren't public defenders in the interest of symmetry, as they show a bias in the other direction. Thus, totally independent. Few review boards that I'm aware of meet that description, and the ones that do are generally too poorly funded and depend on volunteer support, which is not sufficient to ensure proper custodial care.
In fact, I'd probably want this system to be run by historians or librarians, and they tend to extend proper regard to care for records. (And the librarians that I'm thinking of are the ones that operate rare book rooms, not the ones that encourage lending out sole copies of out-of-print books.)
If you haven't noticed that things have gotten significantly worse over the last 15 years, then you haven't been watching.
This may not be "the end is near", but it's certainly an enabling intermediate step.
You don't build habitable shells, you build cellular tubes. The suggestion I saw was a mile in diameter, rotating for gravity, and long. The cells connect into strands, but can be sealed off separately so that, among other reasons, you can have vacuum physics labs. You build lots and lots of strands at slightly different orbital heights and slightly different angles, so they interfere minimally with each other's solar panel wings. Each cell would effectively be a city. Or town with fields, or game preserve, or agricultural land. Etc. Each cell would have independent motive power, though not much. Probably ion rockets, because mass would be precious. And each cell could, in principle, attach itself to any other selected strand, though orbital energetic requirements would make doing that frequently, or to distant strands, problematic.
You won't get enough mass that way to build a Dyson Sphere, or anything even approximately similar. You could build several kinds of "starter sets", but you probably couldn't even get enough mass for a real Dyson Sphere even by disassembling the planets. (You might be able to build something as thin as a light sail, but how would you hold it in place. Besides, that would emit infrared radiation that wasn't detected. So you need something substantial enough to support nano-scale heat scavengers that reduce the frequency to down below the range that we were observing in. And those take mass too, because each one needs a cold radiator.)
Now somewhere I read that this was a trinary system, so perhaps if you disassembled the mass of all planets around 3 stars you'd have enough mass.
If they had an FTL drive, they'd be unlikely to build a Dyson Sphere, or anything that could be mistaken for one. (Unless they're all so addicted to video games that nobody want to have the lag of moving further from the server.)