For this kind of problem a couple of decades for cleanup may not be excessive. And you pointed about the failures of climate science without understanding their nature. Greenland is melting a LOT faster than predicted. It's more likely that we have less time than we think for the cleanup than that we have more.
When you say: I would take environmentalism more seriously, if its adherents knew how to prioritize. you actually mean if their priorities agreed with yours.
I know of several times that the US govt paid for data, but the data wasn't exactly private data, and the purchase wasn't secret. They may also have done it with private data, or have kept their purchase secret, but I don't know about those cases. And it may well depend on which arm of the federal government you are dealing with.
I can't tell whether you're serious or not, and if you are, whether or not you're being sarcastic.
The reason to vote Democrat is that the Republicans are even worse. If you're not in a swing state, you should probably vote 3rd party, but how sure you need to be that you aren't in a swing state depends on how much worse you think one candidate is than the other. And you need to do it in the certain knowledge that your 3rd party vote will not yield the candidate that will be elected...so if their platform wouldn't really work it doesn't matter.
You've got a language mixup, which others have been sharing.
Legal is not a unitary entity. If it was an official Russian policy, then it was legal IN RUSSIA. This doesn't make it legal in the US.
The actions of the CIA are frequently illegal in the country in which they occur. This doesn't make them illegal within the US.
And action can be taken against someone in court only in the place where the action is illegal. I used to be able to say and only for actions that were illegal where they occurred, but US precedents, e.g. the case against Kim Dotcom, have removed that constraint. Now you could be tried in a Thai court for slandering their king, convicted under Thai law, and have extradition applied for even if you never set foot in Thailand. I consider this an extremely harebrained precedent, but the US has established it multiple times. And this means that if they could identify the perpetrators, presuming they are Russians and in Russia, and have never left Russia, they could be prosecuted in a US court, and a request for extradition could be sent for them. I don't know what extradition treaties the US has with Russia, but I believe that Russia is attempting to join the EU (has joined), and I think that there's an extradition treaty involved in that. So potentially the "accused perpetrators" could be extradited from Russia to the US under treaty for doing something that was legal and part of their official duties within Russia to be tried in a US court.
First you'd need to prove that he as an operative rather than just a collaborator. I really doubt you could find any evidence that would show that. (The Manchurian Candidate comes to mind, but that was fiction.)
Communists, as opposed to those who pretend to be communists, have always been quite thin on the ground everywhere. There hasn't been a communist government in Russia since Lenin's 2nd year. The Russian Communist Party quite quickly turned into oligarchs, and the guy at the top turned into a proto-Czar. Stalin had a lot in common with Ivan the Terrible. I'm told neither was really hated within Russia. (Georgia might have a different opinion.)
So for Trump to think highly of the top oligarch is not surprising. I'm much more surprised by his admiration for Hitler.
P.S.: I case you can't guess, I'm *not* a Trump supporter.
Well, it's not *completely* irrelevant, but the real question is "Did whoever did it doctor the stuff before releasing it?" So far it seems as if they didn't, which causes me to doubt that anyone very high within a government is involved...but it could just be someone quite subtle.
True, but the published evidence that I've heard is that the attacks came from IPs within Russia. The could be forwarded, it could be non-governmental, etc. Still, there must be better evidence that *that*. But would the target audience of the articles understand any more detailed evidence?
So I'm torn between:
1) They don't have any decent evidence, and
2) This is politics, so even though they have decent evidence they don't want to bore their audience.
I consider;
3) They've got decent evidence, but they've got good reasons to hide it
I think you're assuming a lot of people like Hillary, and I don't think that's true. They just see Trump as worse. Certainly that's my opinion. Hillary would need to be shown to be acting arbitrarily and viscously against entire groups of people before I'd start to think that Trump was a better choice.
There is the reasonable point that her vice president appears to be even worse than she is, but the same is true of Trump.
And this is due to a Supreme Court decision in the 1960's that said a city couldn't have a residence requirement for General Assistance. Ever since then it's been a race to the bottom.
I once worked at a defense contractor. "Company confidential" data was given more protection than official US govt. "Secret" data. So it wouldn't surprise me if the political campaign had better protection. If it doesn't, it means that they really just don't know what they're doing, and the defense of incompetence should be believed.
But part of the trouble is that just because someone advertises himself as knowledgeable doesn't mean he *is*. And if you don't know an area it's quite easy to get given a snow job.
Sort of. I haven't bought ANYTHING with Sony's name on it since that event. I will admit my intention has wavered a few times, but every time it did they'd commit another atrocity, and it would be reinforced.
Friends don't let friends buy Sony.
Whenever the name "Sony" comes up, I make it a point to say something bad about them. Something which is both true and bad. Occasionally I'll also complement the company they once were.
I never bought a PS/3. I was still considering it when they pulled that monumental act of treason against their customers.
While largely correct, you statement should be understood "The RIAA acting as a criminal terrorist is no longer news." It's not that they've stopped doing it, it's that it's so common it's no longer news.
There was a time when every murder or robbery was front-page news (in the local paper). OK, the town was small, and it was uncommon, so it was news. Now the towns have turned into cities, and the papers are parts of a chain with no local ownership, and murder and robbery aren't even mentioned. This doesn't mean they have stopped happening.
Valid concerns. When strong AI appears the result will depend vitally on just how it was programmed/trained/motivated/etc. Afterwards will be too late to change things.
The thing is, without a strong AI it's nearly certain that we will have wiped ourselves out before the end of the century. With strong AI there's a chance not only of survival, but of decent survival. I'll grant that it's only a chance, and some of the people pushing AI make me queasy. They don't realize the dangers. But there are also dangers in avoiding it. We've already been within 30 seconds of major nuclear war, and the weapons have gotten faster and more responsive since then. Also spread out to more countries, i.e. more different fingers on the trigger. Of course, most countries couldn't do a massive nuclear war on their own, but there are entangling alliances, and even if not, a nuclear autumn isn't something anyone would feel happy about. Then there's biological warfare, which is cheap enough that anybody can play. The more highly skilled forms require a bit more investment, so you'd need a small country or corporation to be involved, but those aren't thin on the ground. Then there's X. I don't know what X is, but it's going to show up. Hypersonic bots? Targeted diseases? Something.
So strong AI is incredibly dangerous, but it's probably our only hope. I hope it develops our of a merger between hospital management software and automated car software, that would give it the appropriate goals and understanding, but it doesn't look very likely. A more likely ancestry is the software that evolves to replace middle management. If it develops out of the military software we'll be dead before we know it happened.
The evidence is pretty weak too. There's reasonable evidence that many of it sources of attack were from ISPs in Russia, but that's a long way from decent evidence that the Russian government was behind it.
Perhaps someone who knows of better evidence could post a link...
If you waited this long to notice, you're hopeless. Snowden only confirmed what was obvious anyway. And the Republicans are not any cleaner at all, in ways they are worse.
The questions is "What are you going to do about it?". My personal evaluation is that any workable approach is going to cause so much hardship that nobody with an ounce of empathy or foresight would recommend it.
OTOH, the Singularity *IS* coming, and by my estimate before 2035. (I actually estimate 2030, but there's no real reason for that date, it just the one I guessed most probably a couple of decades ago.) That's going to change everything so drastically that nobody can accurately predict even approximately what the results will, be, so the best action is to just try and hold on through the chaos that precedes it. It's a part of the reason that the Trump candidacy has so much support, and also part of the driving force behind Bernie. People can sense that things are changing too rapidly to keep track of, and want to feel safe. For some that means a gang lead by a blustering bully, for others it means someone strong to take care of them.
It's still fraud, but if you want the fraud prosecuted, you need each case handled individually. You can't even do a class action, because each is a separate instance, and the actions aren't identical. So each defrauded customer would need to get their local police interested.
Good luck with that.
I agree that the fine is massively too small, but it should make it easier for any prosecution that is actually attempted.
It's not pointless, but it's not reasonable allocation of effort, either.
P.S.: Natural gas is not Carbon neutral unless it's sources from bio-fermentation, and often not then. Solar, hydro, wind, and even nuclear are better choices if that's your goal. It's better than coal, but that's faint praise indeed.
That's not the only problem. We haven't yet experienced all the effects of the CO2 already emitted even if you don't include the knock-on effects like melting of permafrost causing emission of methane. So whatever we do, unless we actually decrease the atmospheric CO2 level, we're going to continue to get increased global warming, though some areas are predicted to experience the exact opposite. E.g. the gulf stream has been slowing, which may lead to Europe, especially Ireland and Britain, experiencing extremely cold winters (but probably hot summers). Also the temperature difference between the equator and the poles have caused the jet streams to weaken, which has already caused weather patterns to change more slowly, meaning longer heat, rain, and cold waves, etc.
That said, is we can just slow things up a bit it might help. But we aren't going to be able to hold things to a 2 degree rise.
But you picked something that people don't believe exists, so their being non-existent isn't a problem with the argument. I did trace back some of the roots of the myth of their physical existence, but those don't apply after the late middle ages. After that people didn't believe that they existed, so the only appropriate interpretation is the symbolic level.
No. In fact there has been a unicorn...albeit one derived from a goat.
Now there are clearly implausible aspects to what most people think of as a unicorn. But the word just means "one horned" and there's lots of ways of doing that. The goat example was one of them, based around a belief that somebody had as to what the origin of the myth was. I think they were wrong, and instead trace it to a combination of mangled tales of the rhinoceros combined with mangled reports of some Babylonian sculptures. And possibly some reports of an Arabian antelope that appears to have one horn when you look at it from the side at a distance. And all these things actually exist or existed.
But that's just the physical layer, it doesn't touch the underlying layer which is where religion really lives. And when I try to look at that layer with a unicorn I don't get any consistent story. Some people use it to signify sexual purity. Others use it as a symbol of Christ (without specifying in what way), Others seem to be using it as the essence of a kind of beauty. Etc. And while I can accept most of those (if you want to use it as a symbol of Christ, you need to specify in what way, as they do for the Pelican) they don't form anything consistent.
But how would you debunk "Is an artistic symbol of Christ"? The only way I can even imagine is to attempt to prove that the person was using it in some other way, and that's not very successful as symbols are frequently used in multiple ways simultaneously.
The peculiar thing about most religions, and the thing which causes me to doubt them, is the belief that the entity that created the universe cares much about what people do. At least this theory has a reasonable way to justify that belief.
Please note that most religions have not been debunked, and are in principle not capable of being debunked. (The older versions were, and have been, but that's not true of modern religions, not even the Flying Spaghetti Monster, much less of any major protestant religion [except those that are explicitly in denial] or of the Roman Catholic Church, or any version of Buddhism with which I am familiar, or....)
So I adapt my belief in religions to their observable predictive power. Some of them do pretty well if you really understand them rather than understand what their detractors say about them or their "lies to children". And I, myself, am a believer in an idiosect...i.e., I'm the only member.
Now the idea that we live in a simulation is not inconsistent with any known evidence. Until you start making specific predictions about what that implies it can't be. In fact, it's a very traditional interpretation with roots going back to Aristotle, and probably before. The old way of saying it would be "we are thoughts in the mind of God", and it's one of the foundation principles of science. It implies that we can learn to know God by studying the environment within which we find ourselves.
Slashdot Mirror
For this kind of problem a couple of decades for cleanup may not be excessive. And you pointed about the failures of climate science without understanding their nature. Greenland is melting a LOT faster than predicted. It's more likely that we have less time than we think for the cleanup than that we have more.
When you say:
I would take environmentalism more seriously, if its adherents knew how to prioritize.
you actually mean if their priorities agreed with yours.
I know of several times that the US govt paid for data, but the data wasn't exactly private data, and the purchase wasn't secret. They may also have done it with private data, or have kept their purchase secret, but I don't know about those cases. And it may well depend on which arm of the federal government you are dealing with.
I can't tell whether you're serious or not, and if you are, whether or not you're being sarcastic.
The reason to vote Democrat is that the Republicans are even worse. If you're not in a swing state, you should probably vote 3rd party, but how sure you need to be that you aren't in a swing state depends on how much worse you think one candidate is than the other. And you need to do it in the certain knowledge that your 3rd party vote will not yield the candidate that will be elected...so if their platform wouldn't really work it doesn't matter.
You've got a language mixup, which others have been sharing.
Legal is not a unitary entity. If it was an official Russian policy, then it was legal IN RUSSIA. This doesn't make it legal in the US.
The actions of the CIA are frequently illegal in the country in which they occur. This doesn't make them illegal within the US.
And action can be taken against someone in court only in the place where the action is illegal. I used to be able to say and only for actions that were illegal where they occurred, but US precedents, e.g. the case against Kim Dotcom, have removed that constraint. Now you could be tried in a Thai court for slandering their king, convicted under Thai law, and have extradition applied for even if you never set foot in Thailand. I consider this an extremely harebrained precedent, but the US has established it multiple times. And this means that if they could identify the perpetrators, presuming they are Russians and in Russia, and have never left Russia, they could be prosecuted in a US court, and a request for extradition could be sent for them. I don't know what extradition treaties the US has with Russia, but I believe that Russia is attempting to join the EU (has joined), and I think that there's an extradition treaty involved in that. So potentially the "accused perpetrators" could be extradited from Russia to the US under treaty for doing something that was legal and part of their official duties within Russia to be tried in a US court.
STUPID, STUPID, STUPID, STUPID, STUPID.
First you'd need to prove that he as an operative rather than just a collaborator. I really doubt you could find any evidence that would show that. (The Manchurian Candidate comes to mind, but that was fiction.)
Communists, as opposed to those who pretend to be communists, have always been quite thin on the ground everywhere. There hasn't been a communist government in Russia since Lenin's 2nd year. The Russian Communist Party quite quickly turned into oligarchs, and the guy at the top turned into a proto-Czar. Stalin had a lot in common with Ivan the Terrible. I'm told neither was really hated within Russia. (Georgia might have a different opinion.)
So for Trump to think highly of the top oligarch is not surprising. I'm much more surprised by his admiration for Hitler.
P.S.: I case you can't guess, I'm *not* a Trump supporter.
Well, it's not *completely* irrelevant, but the real question is "Did whoever did it doctor the stuff before releasing it?" So far it seems as if they didn't, which causes me to doubt that anyone very high within a government is involved...but it could just be someone quite subtle.
1) They don't have any decent evidence, and
2) This is politics, so even though they have decent evidence they don't want to bore their audience.
I consider;
3) They've got decent evidence, but they've got good reasons to hide it
to be an extremely outside chance.
I think you're assuming a lot of people like Hillary, and I don't think that's true. They just see Trump as worse. Certainly that's my opinion. Hillary would need to be shown to be acting arbitrarily and viscously against entire groups of people before I'd start to think that Trump was a better choice.
There is the reasonable point that her vice president appears to be even worse than she is, but the same is true of Trump.
And this is due to a Supreme Court decision in the 1960's that said a city couldn't have a residence requirement for General Assistance. Ever since then it's been a race to the bottom.
I once worked at a defense contractor. "Company confidential" data was given more protection than official US govt. "Secret" data. So it wouldn't surprise me if the political campaign had better protection. If it doesn't, it means that they really just don't know what they're doing, and the defense of incompetence should be believed.
But part of the trouble is that just because someone advertises himself as knowledgeable doesn't mean he *is*. And if you don't know an area it's quite easy to get given a snow job.
Sort of. I haven't bought ANYTHING with Sony's name on it since that event. I will admit my intention has wavered a few times, but every time it did they'd commit another atrocity, and it would be reinforced.
Friends don't let friends buy Sony.
Whenever the name "Sony" comes up, I make it a point to say something bad about them. Something which is both true and bad. Occasionally I'll also complement the company they once were.
I never bought a PS/3. I was still considering it when they pulled that monumental act of treason against their customers.
While largely correct, you statement should be understood "The RIAA acting as a criminal terrorist is no longer news." It's not that they've stopped doing it, it's that it's so common it's no longer news.
There was a time when every murder or robbery was front-page news (in the local paper). OK, the town was small, and it was uncommon, so it was news. Now the towns have turned into cities, and the papers are parts of a chain with no local ownership, and murder and robbery aren't even mentioned. This doesn't mean they have stopped happening.
Valid concerns. When strong AI appears the result will depend vitally on just how it was programmed/trained/motivated/etc. Afterwards will be too late to change things.
The thing is, without a strong AI it's nearly certain that we will have wiped ourselves out before the end of the century. With strong AI there's a chance not only of survival, but of decent survival. I'll grant that it's only a chance, and some of the people pushing AI make me queasy. They don't realize the dangers. But there are also dangers in avoiding it. We've already been within 30 seconds of major nuclear war, and the weapons have gotten faster and more responsive since then. Also spread out to more countries, i.e. more different fingers on the trigger. Of course, most countries couldn't do a massive nuclear war on their own, but there are entangling alliances, and even if not, a nuclear autumn isn't something anyone would feel happy about. Then there's biological warfare, which is cheap enough that anybody can play. The more highly skilled forms require a bit more investment, so you'd need a small country or corporation to be involved, but those aren't thin on the ground. Then there's X. I don't know what X is, but it's going to show up. Hypersonic bots? Targeted diseases? Something.
So strong AI is incredibly dangerous, but it's probably our only hope. I hope it develops our of a merger between hospital management software and automated car software, that would give it the appropriate goals and understanding, but it doesn't look very likely. A more likely ancestry is the software that evolves to replace middle management. If it develops out of the military software we'll be dead before we know it happened.
The evidence is pretty weak too. There's reasonable evidence that many of it sources of attack were from ISPs in Russia, but that's a long way from decent evidence that the Russian government was behind it.
Perhaps someone who knows of better evidence could post a link...
Maybe he just got Trump mad at him. I hear that's easy to do, even unintentionally.
If you waited this long to notice, you're hopeless. Snowden only confirmed what was obvious anyway. And the Republicans are not any cleaner at all, in ways they are worse.
The questions is "What are you going to do about it?". My personal evaluation is that any workable approach is going to cause so much hardship that nobody with an ounce of empathy or foresight would recommend it.
OTOH, the Singularity *IS* coming, and by my estimate before 2035. (I actually estimate 2030, but there's no real reason for that date, it just the one I guessed most probably a couple of decades ago.) That's going to change everything so drastically that nobody can accurately predict even approximately what the results will, be, so the best action is to just try and hold on through the chaos that precedes it. It's a part of the reason that the Trump candidacy has so much support, and also part of the driving force behind Bernie. People can sense that things are changing too rapidly to keep track of, and want to feel safe. For some that means a gang lead by a blustering bully, for others it means someone strong to take care of them.
It's still fraud, but if you want the fraud prosecuted, you need each case handled individually. You can't even do a class action, because each is a separate instance, and the actions aren't identical. So each defrauded customer would need to get their local police interested.
Good luck with that.
I agree that the fine is massively too small, but it should make it easier for any prosecution that is actually attempted.
It's not pointless, but it's not reasonable allocation of effort, either.
P.S.: Natural gas is not Carbon neutral unless it's sources from bio-fermentation, and often not then. Solar, hydro, wind, and even nuclear are better choices if that's your goal. It's better than coal, but that's faint praise indeed.
That's not the only problem. We haven't yet experienced all the effects of the CO2 already emitted even if you don't include the knock-on effects like melting of permafrost causing emission of methane. So whatever we do, unless we actually decrease the atmospheric CO2 level, we're going to continue to get increased global warming, though some areas are predicted to experience the exact opposite. E.g. the gulf stream has been slowing, which may lead to Europe, especially Ireland and Britain, experiencing extremely cold winters (but probably hot summers). Also the temperature difference between the equator and the poles have caused the jet streams to weaken, which has already caused weather patterns to change more slowly, meaning longer heat, rain, and cold waves, etc.
That said, is we can just slow things up a bit it might help. But we aren't going to be able to hold things to a 2 degree rise.
But you picked something that people don't believe exists, so their being non-existent isn't a problem with the argument. I did trace back some of the roots of the myth of their physical existence, but those don't apply after the late middle ages. After that people didn't believe that they existed, so the only appropriate interpretation is the symbolic level.
No. In fact there has been a unicorn ...albeit one derived from a goat.
Now there are clearly implausible aspects to what most people think of as a unicorn. But the word just means "one horned" and there's lots of ways of doing that. The goat example was one of them, based around a belief that somebody had as to what the origin of the myth was. I think they were wrong, and instead trace it to a combination of mangled tales of the rhinoceros combined with mangled reports of some Babylonian sculptures. And possibly some reports of an Arabian antelope that appears to have one horn when you look at it from the side at a distance. And all these things actually exist or existed.
But that's just the physical layer, it doesn't touch the underlying layer which is where religion really lives. And when I try to look at that layer with a unicorn I don't get any consistent story. Some people use it to signify sexual purity. Others use it as a symbol of Christ (without specifying in what way), Others seem to be using it as the essence of a kind of beauty. Etc. And while I can accept most of those (if you want to use it as a symbol of Christ, you need to specify in what way, as they do for the Pelican) they don't form anything consistent.
But how would you debunk "Is an artistic symbol of Christ"? The only way I can even imagine is to attempt to prove that the person was using it in some other way, and that's not very successful as symbols are frequently used in multiple ways simultaneously.
The peculiar thing about most religions, and the thing which causes me to doubt them, is the belief that the entity that created the universe cares much about what people do. At least this theory has a reasonable way to justify that belief.
Please note that most religions have not been debunked, and are in principle not capable of being debunked. (The older versions were, and have been, but that's not true of modern religions, not even the Flying Spaghetti Monster, much less of any major protestant religion [except those that are explicitly in denial] or of the Roman Catholic Church, or any version of Buddhism with which I am familiar, or....)
So I adapt my belief in religions to their observable predictive power. Some of them do pretty well if you really understand them rather than understand what their detractors say about them or their "lies to children". And I, myself, am a believer in an idiosect...i.e., I'm the only member.
Now the idea that we live in a simulation is not inconsistent with any known evidence. Until you start making specific predictions about what that implies it can't be. In fact, it's a very traditional interpretation with roots going back to Aristotle, and probably before. The old way of saying it would be "we are thoughts in the mind of God", and it's one of the foundation principles of science. It implies that we can learn to know God by studying the environment within which we find ourselves.