If they're letting it sit in Ireland or wherever because of a 35% tax, what's to stop them letting it sit in Ireland because of a 10% tax?
Why would they pull that money back into a taxable country when there's a clear benefit for them in letting it sit? 0% tax is still cheaper than even 1% tax.
Mindlessly slashing taxes does not work.
Because they're willing to pay 10% but not 35%, simple as that. The last time the US announced a tax holiday, that's exactly what happened, actually.
>>So again I ask: what are you going to do about it? What will you or have you changed about your lifestyle to help avert global disaster?
I plan on being a sanctimonious bastard to everyone I know, while running my AC 24/7 and flying about in a private jet, when I'm not at home in my 10,000 square foot mansion with low-efficiency windows.
I'll then form a carbon trading company in which guilty environmentalists who commute to work every day can pay to "offset" their emissions by having me stay at home and not work at all, as I can live off the offset money.
Oh, wait, sorry, I'm not Al Gore.
In all seriousness, while I do run my AC pretty heavily in the summer, my net energy consumption from the grid is minimal (I have solar on my house), and I do work out of my house, so I figure I'm in the top 99th percentile of Americans. No need to kill myself bicycling.
>>95% of US electric power is generated by BURNING COAL
Uh, no, Captain Hyperbole. It's consistently between 40%-50%. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States) NG, which is cleaner than coal, but still not "clean" is about a quarter of production. The mix varies a lot by state - we don't have coal reserves in California, so we generate from NG instead of coal, and are boosting our renewables... though we're paying some of the highest energy rates in the country for the privilege.
Most of the rest comes from Nuclear and Hydro (our two big green sources of energy), which environmentalists hate for some reason, not really understanding that by blocking/shutting down/destroying nuclear plants and dams, they're just upping our coal and NG production.
>>And the answer is simple -- do what the French did -- go nuclear
When the first one came out, it was the only tablet that piqued my interest. I like the idea of a dual use, "dockable," tablet since I don't imagine I'd use a tablet much longer after the novelty wore off. Asus has really done something great with this incarnation too, it looks like.
I basically had to get a tablet for work, and I dithered a while between the Transformer and an iPad. The iPad has a much cleaner user experience - it scrolls smoothly (all Android tablets will jerk around), text appears slowly on Android browsers, and so forth. I sort of hated the idea of buying into the Apple walled garden, but then again, it would integrate with iTunes, but an Android Tablet would integrate with my Android phone... and so that was a wash. Ultimately I got the Transformer, though, simply for the reason that I can type much quicker on an actual keyboard than an OSK, and I'm pretty good at using an OSK.
If ASUS ever integrates the ability to emulate Windows executables on a Transformer, I think they'd have a killer app on their hands - the attachable keyboard and touchpad means that they can run apps using a native interface, without having to refactor it to work in a touch environment. Then I wouldn't need a laptop at all.
The fundamental problem is bankers get big checks on the upside, but the feds come in and bail them out on the downside, which incentivizes exactly the worst kind of behavior for banks, as Taleb points out.
We either have to not bail them out on the downside, or not give them bonuses on the upside, or just bring back something like Glass-Steagall which limits the sorts of investments banks can do with peoples' checking accounts.
>>That's why the Buffets and Gates of the world don't sweat higher taxes too much
Yes, that's why Microsoft has $50,000,000,000 in cash sitting in Ireland, where it can't be taxed by the IRS. It certainly has nothing to do with the 35% corporate tax rate. No sir. Not at all. They don't sweat a $17.5B tax bill.
This may confuse some liberal minds, but if the corporate tax rate was lowered (10%?), Microsoft and Google and other multinationals that shelter their money from the IRS would pull all that money back into America, actually pay taxes on it, and probably kick start our economy in the process.
At the same time, eliminating subsidies for companies like PG&E that made $5B in profits last year while having some of the highest energy rates in the nation, while paying nega-taxes, is probably a good idea. Two out of the three of those are reasonable, but all three together means that they're just fucking over the public.
>>Plus, in case you haven't been reading the news for the last 3 years, the financial sector owes us some money.
I agree. I am against raising taxes on general principle, but in the case where the government spends X billion dollars, I think a targeted tax is warranted.
>>The truth is we can accurately estimate how much oil is left, and we can see that our renewable resources are lagging behind enough to be worrisome.
Are you a peak oiler? You might want to compare estimates of what peak oilers think our oil production would be today (in Nov 2011) vs. what oil production has actually been. It's kind of enlightening.
Use of renewables has been exponentially increasing. If it's not fast enough for you, then you're probably on the old peak oil trip. Like Harold Camping, they are in desperate need for a revamping of their end-of-the-world predictions. We actually have plenty of fossil fuel reserves, in one form or another.
Global warming is really a bigger issue than running out of fossil fuels.
>>At some point, we wont have enough energy to meet the demand.
Which is sufficiently vague enough to be both obviously true, and fairly meaningless.
It's kind of pointless to focus on anything across a far distant horizon.
>>I suspect the population will stabilize eventually
Right, in 60 years or so, according to the UN. There's plenty of energy available for a stable population, especially if we can get fusion productive (E=MC^2 and all that).
>>... KDE 4, Windows 7, Windows Vista... some people hate ALL GUIs.
That's too simplistic. Every time a new version comes out, I read over all the new features (so I know I'm not missing something) and then proceed to play with it, and see what I like and what I don't like. I like Pinned apps on Win7's taskbar mainly so that my applications are always in the same order. I hate process grouping on the taskbar, and hated it ever since it first came out 10 years ago. It's only useful if you have so many windows open you need the grouping - otherwise it's an extra click every time to switch windows. And you can't click on the window on the taskbar to minimize it, which is very useful when clicking on the taskbar to quickly pop windows up and down. In general, my metric for a usable UI is how much time I spend dealing with the UI vs. doing what I want to be doing. When Win7 made a lot of simple tasks require extra time (try finding an application on your XP programs menu - whose name you can't remember - vs. hunting through a massive alphabetized list on Win7), it earned a lot of negative points in my book.
The deal breaker for me was that while Windows provided the option to disable a lot of the shit I hated (process groups) and had hidden options available to re-enable other stuff I used (like the Quick Launch bar, which is faster than Shift-Clicking or Shift-Winkeying applications to open new windows), it didn't have any options available for disabling some of their most stupid decisions - no alphabetical list view for Control Panels, no up arrow in Windows Explorer (breadcrumbs break on the desktop or through symlinks), and their horrible, horrible start menu.
So I didn't buy Win7 for years, even though a few of the features (drag to the left and right to do easy splitscreening) I did like. Then I found Classic Shell, and Microsoft got Win7 sales for myself and all of the PCs in my company. They really ought to send those guys a thank you card.
>>The problem that I have with all the new GUIs that are coming out it seems like it's all just change for the sake of change.
I was going to make a post on here, but then the first post I read said what I was going to say.
For all the touted features these new GUIs have, the telling point is that they never focus on how they actually HELP YOU use the system faster / become more productive / etc.
Vista/Windows7 is just as bad on the Windows front, thank goodness for Classic Shell.
>>Make no mistake, being financially prudent in during the 00s boom was the real dumb move.
Obviously, in hindsight, the best move would have been to take out a no-money down loan in 2000 and flip it at the top of the market, but I've never been much for market timing.
Instead, I look at rent/mortgage ratios, and make decisions based thereon. After the bubble burst, I was able to move out of my crappy apartment into a nice home for a little bit more every month.
I don't particularly care if I will / will not miss out on bailout money, though I am preventing my wife from repaying her student loan to hedge against the OWS socialists pushing through student loan forgiveness.
Actually, the housing bubble was obvious to a loooot of people. You can read all the criticisms of Fannie Mae / the CRA / overpriced housing well before 2007. It's not like Barney Frank didn't know what would happen when he forced banks to issue loans to people that by definition couldn't afford it, he simply didn't care. The fact that it would cause a bubble and a crash were obvious, and people like me saved our money and rented in overpriced shitholes for years until the bubble burst. And I still don't think we're at the bottom of it.
You can find videos from CSPAN of our elected officials warning about this (and Frank and Maxine denying it), but it was the American people that bought into the bubble...
Happened to a good friend of mine who was an undergraduate studying with the goal in mind of attending seminary and becoming a pastor. She eventually decided the evidence was not what she'd thought it was, and became something of an agnostic. She was attending a religious college at the time, and other than probably some disappointment from her parents, suffered no other social stigma. Nobody in my church believes that you should believe in something you consider false. It wouldn't make the slightest amount of sense to us... though, to be fair, a lot of fundiesr and Mormons seem to delight in believing false things as a test of faith or something.
Not really. More that people benefit from things other than just pure monetary ones. Using such a strict definition, you could argue that almost everything we do other than work and maintaining our ability to work (food, sleep, health) would be things "against our best interest."
This is hardly controversial, BTW. For most people, the entire point of earning money past survival needs is solely to spend it on intangible benefits. It's a bit arrogant to claim you know better than them what intangibles they should be spending money on.
If people are judged on the merits of their life, and being a Christian is less likely to have them steal another man's wife, murder the guy when he finds out, and then run off with all his property, then yeah, Christianity improves your chances of getting into heaven and reduces the chances of going to hell.
Certainly the Bible talks about people acting virtuously or evilly prior to the handing down of the Law, and well before Jesus.
>>Questioning faith: Discouraged. Sometimes even punished.
Not in my church. Oddly enough, they found that asking questions leads to deeper understandings of faith.
I don't think I ever heard my pastor growing up ever once utter the typical cop-out of "...well, it's a divine mystery," There's lots of things we don't know, naturally, but he was always ready to supply the best theories for these things.
>>It's also interesting to read his open letter to Coyne that is posted along with the video.
Yowza. If that's true (there was no prior agreement to release the video) then the atheist is basically guilty of stirring up an internet witch hunt against the guy.
It should really give all the atheists on Slashdot something to reflect upon... you all should think about how easily you were turned into a tool for an evil man's purposes, and contrast that against similar claims you make against religion.
>>Even Jesus seems to be a composite of lots of earlier pagan traditions
Given that the lion's share of what he talked about was based on the Old Testament, it's highly unlikely he's a pagan composite. The Expounding of the Law, etc., simply would be impossible to write from pagan sources.
>>The Pauline doctrine is a huge part of what broke my faith... to actually adhere to it you would have to essentially stop being human, and telling yourself that you were a worthless "sinner" over and over again and perpetually begging for forgiveness is incredibly damaging.
Eh, it's partly St. Paul, but a large part of it is the result of St. Augustine's philosophy that one "cannot not sin". Not all Christians buy into that belief. (Can one sin when in a brain-dead coma? I don't think so, personally.)
>>Even when I was still indoctrinated I noticed lots of inconsistencies in the New testament but I was conditioned not to ask questions and just accept it.
It's a shame. My church actively encouraged questioning, well, everything.
>>The people who believe in creationism will never be swayed away from it
Just as Dawkins is unlikely, in the middle of a debate, to go, "You know? You're right! God is real."
Hell, AJ Ayers couldn't be swayed from his famed atheism even after he had a deathbed encounter with God. Man's ego is a powerful thing.
No, the point of debates like these is for the audience, not the speakers. I've actually changed my mind on quite a few issues after listening to presumably well-informed people on each side of a debate argue with each other.
>>No wonder: religion has usually opposed arts and sciences
Obviously, being an atheist doesn't stop you from believing total nonsense. The Conflict Thesis (that Religion is naturally hostile to religionl) didn't come into existence until almost the 20th Century. This was not because people were all friendly to the Church up until then (the Protestants certainly were not), but because it required a certain amount of rewriting of the history. It's now considered inaccurate.
>>It's time for religion to be closed out from the scientific debate altogether.
Religion shouldn't be part of scientific debate, insofar as debating the actual science goes - we don't need to interview a bishop to find out if he thinks that neutrinos can go faster than light (unless the Bishop is a physics PhD working for the Vatican Observatory, perhaps.) The only interaction it should have with science is in the area of ethics.
You see humans as "a jumble of biological components", but I see them as entities worthy of possessing natural rights, that ought to be secure against deprivation.of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
>>If that is all that climategate amounts to, then ok. Some guy didn't want to broker a deal between the data owners and the 'skeptics'. So what?
Stop trying to excuse the actions of your team.
Science needs openness, and the Freedom of Information Act is a law of the land. Ignoring the latter (and conspiring with others to find ways to lie to dodge FOIA requests) was probably illegal, and harms the former.
It's certainly not the smoking gun that the AGW skeptic crowd hyped it to be, that's for sure.
Yeah. The last time I was in China, the government came through with a bulldozer and knocked down all the illegal street vendors on the road, then stopped an arrow straight superhighway through it. This was in the middle of the BFE mind you, but they gave no notice to the guys running the stands.
Was the closest thing I'd ever seen to SimCity in real life.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Where are you getting your numbers
Which part of "consistently between 40%-50%" doesn't match your link reporting 49% for the last year?
It was the guy I was replying to that stated 95% coal.
Because they're willing to pay 10% but not 35%, simple as that. The last time the US announced a tax holiday, that's exactly what happened, actually.
>>So again I ask: what are you going to do about it? What will you or have you changed about your lifestyle to help avert global disaster?
I plan on being a sanctimonious bastard to everyone I know, while running my AC 24/7 and flying about in a private jet, when I'm not at home in my 10,000 square foot mansion with low-efficiency windows.
I'll then form a carbon trading company in which guilty environmentalists who commute to work every day can pay to "offset" their emissions by having me stay at home and not work at all, as I can live off the offset money.
Oh, wait, sorry, I'm not Al Gore.
In all seriousness, while I do run my AC pretty heavily in the summer, my net energy consumption from the grid is minimal (I have solar on my house), and I do work out of my house, so I figure I'm in the top 99th percentile of Americans. No need to kill myself bicycling.
>>95% of US electric power is generated by BURNING COAL
Uh, no, Captain Hyperbole. It's consistently between 40%-50%. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States) NG, which is cleaner than coal, but still not "clean" is about a quarter of production. The mix varies a lot by state - we don't have coal reserves in California, so we generate from NG instead of coal, and are boosting our renewables... though we're paying some of the highest energy rates in the country for the privilege.
Most of the rest comes from Nuclear and Hydro (our two big green sources of energy), which environmentalists hate for some reason, not really understanding that by blocking/shutting down/destroying nuclear plants and dams, they're just upping our coal and NG production.
>>And the answer is simple -- do what the French did -- go nuclear
Yep.
I basically had to get a tablet for work, and I dithered a while between the Transformer and an iPad. The iPad has a much cleaner user experience - it scrolls smoothly (all Android tablets will jerk around), text appears slowly on Android browsers, and so forth. I sort of hated the idea of buying into the Apple walled garden, but then again, it would integrate with iTunes, but an Android Tablet would integrate with my Android phone... and so that was a wash. Ultimately I got the Transformer, though, simply for the reason that I can type much quicker on an actual keyboard than an OSK, and I'm pretty good at using an OSK.
If ASUS ever integrates the ability to emulate Windows executables on a Transformer, I think they'd have a killer app on their hands - the attachable keyboard and touchpad means that they can run apps using a native interface, without having to refactor it to work in a touch environment. Then I wouldn't need a laptop at all.
Well, either way.
The fundamental problem is bankers get big checks on the upside, but the feds come in and bail them out on the downside, which incentivizes exactly the worst kind of behavior for banks, as Taleb points out.
We either have to not bail them out on the downside, or not give them bonuses on the upside, or just bring back something like Glass-Steagall which limits the sorts of investments banks can do with peoples' checking accounts.
>>So basically never buy about 95% of stuff :p
Assuming you're not eating your toys, we here in America still actually grow a fair chunk of what we eat.
>>That's why the Buffets and Gates of the world don't sweat higher taxes too much
Yes, that's why Microsoft has $50,000,000,000 in cash sitting in Ireland, where it can't be taxed by the IRS. It certainly has nothing to do with the 35% corporate tax rate. No sir. Not at all. They don't sweat a $17.5B tax bill.
This may confuse some liberal minds, but if the corporate tax rate was lowered (10%?), Microsoft and Google and other multinationals that shelter their money from the IRS would pull all that money back into America, actually pay taxes on it, and probably kick start our economy in the process.
At the same time, eliminating subsidies for companies like PG&E that made $5B in profits last year while having some of the highest energy rates in the nation, while paying nega-taxes, is probably a good idea. Two out of the three of those are reasonable, but all three together means that they're just fucking over the public.
>>Plus, in case you haven't been reading the news for the last 3 years, the financial sector owes us some money.
I agree. I am against raising taxes on general principle, but in the case where the government spends X billion dollars, I think a targeted tax is warranted.
Also, Fannie, I'm looking at you.
>>The truth is we can accurately estimate how much oil is left, and we can see that our renewable resources are lagging behind enough to be worrisome.
Are you a peak oiler? You might want to compare estimates of what peak oilers think our oil production would be today (in Nov 2011) vs. what oil production has actually been. It's kind of enlightening.
Use of renewables has been exponentially increasing. If it's not fast enough for you, then you're probably on the old peak oil trip. Like Harold Camping, they are in desperate need for a revamping of their end-of-the-world predictions. We actually have plenty of fossil fuel reserves, in one form or another.
Global warming is really a bigger issue than running out of fossil fuels.
>>What do you mean by that?
It's not list alphabetical. It's zig-zag alphabetical, which is useless. In other words:
ABC
DEF
GHI
JKL
But if you change the size of the window, it is now:
ABCD
EFGH
IJKL
MNOP
So you go looking for a letter, it used to be in one place, and now is in a totally different place, and it's impossible to scan through them quickly.
Stupid design on Microsoft's part. They only allow sorting Control Panels by category and icon now, no longer allowing list or detail view.
>>At some point, we wont have enough energy to meet the demand.
Which is sufficiently vague enough to be both obviously true, and fairly meaningless.
It's kind of pointless to focus on anything across a far distant horizon.
>>I suspect the population will stabilize eventually
Right, in 60 years or so, according to the UN. There's plenty of energy available for a stable population, especially if we can get fusion productive (E=MC^2 and all that).
>>... KDE 4, Windows 7, Windows Vista... some people hate ALL GUIs.
That's too simplistic. Every time a new version comes out, I read over all the new features (so I know I'm not missing something) and then proceed to play with it, and see what I like and what I don't like. I like Pinned apps on Win7's taskbar mainly so that my applications are always in the same order. I hate process grouping on the taskbar, and hated it ever since it first came out 10 years ago. It's only useful if you have so many windows open you need the grouping - otherwise it's an extra click every time to switch windows. And you can't click on the window on the taskbar to minimize it, which is very useful when clicking on the taskbar to quickly pop windows up and down. In general, my metric for a usable UI is how much time I spend dealing with the UI vs. doing what I want to be doing. When Win7 made a lot of simple tasks require extra time (try finding an application on your XP programs menu - whose name you can't remember - vs. hunting through a massive alphabetized list on Win7), it earned a lot of negative points in my book.
The deal breaker for me was that while Windows provided the option to disable a lot of the shit I hated (process groups) and had hidden options available to re-enable other stuff I used (like the Quick Launch bar, which is faster than Shift-Clicking or Shift-Winkeying applications to open new windows), it didn't have any options available for disabling some of their most stupid decisions - no alphabetical list view for Control Panels, no up arrow in Windows Explorer (breadcrumbs break on the desktop or through symlinks), and their horrible, horrible start menu.
So I didn't buy Win7 for years, even though a few of the features (drag to the left and right to do easy splitscreening) I did like. Then I found Classic Shell, and Microsoft got Win7 sales for myself and all of the PCs in my company. They really ought to send those guys a thank you card.
>>The problem that I have with all the new GUIs that are coming out it seems like it's all just change for the sake of change.
I was going to make a post on here, but then the first post I read said what I was going to say.
For all the touted features these new GUIs have, the telling point is that they never focus on how they actually HELP YOU use the system faster / become more productive / etc.
Vista/Windows7 is just as bad on the Windows front, thank goodness for Classic Shell.
>>Make no mistake, being financially prudent in during the 00s boom was the real dumb move.
Obviously, in hindsight, the best move would have been to take out a no-money down loan in 2000 and flip it at the top of the market, but I've never been much for market timing.
Instead, I look at rent/mortgage ratios, and make decisions based thereon. After the bubble burst, I was able to move out of my crappy apartment into a nice home for a little bit more every month.
I don't particularly care if I will / will not miss out on bailout money, though I am preventing my wife from repaying her student loan to hedge against the OWS socialists pushing through student loan forgiveness.
Actually, the housing bubble was obvious to a loooot of people. You can read all the criticisms of Fannie Mae / the CRA / overpriced housing well before 2007. It's not like Barney Frank didn't know what would happen when he forced banks to issue loans to people that by definition couldn't afford it, he simply didn't care. The fact that it would cause a bubble and a crash were obvious, and people like me saved our money and rented in overpriced shitholes for years until the bubble burst. And I still don't think we're at the bottom of it.
You can find videos from CSPAN of our elected officials warning about this (and Frank and Maxine denying it), but it was the American people that bought into the bubble...
Happened to a good friend of mine who was an undergraduate studying with the goal in mind of attending seminary and becoming a pastor. She eventually decided the evidence was not what she'd thought it was, and became something of an agnostic. She was attending a religious college at the time, and other than probably some disappointment from her parents, suffered no other social stigma. Nobody in my church believes that you should believe in something you consider false. It wouldn't make the slightest amount of sense to us... though, to be fair, a lot of fundiesr and Mormons seem to delight in believing false things as a test of faith or something.
There's a lot of diversity in Christian thinking.
Not really. More that people benefit from things other than just pure monetary ones. Using such a strict definition, you could argue that almost everything we do other than work and maintaining our ability to work (food, sleep, health) would be things "against our best interest."
This is hardly controversial, BTW. For most people, the entire point of earning money past survival needs is solely to spend it on intangible benefits. It's a bit arrogant to claim you know better than them what intangibles they should be spending money on.
If people are judged on the merits of their life, and being a Christian is less likely to have them steal another man's wife, murder the guy when he finds out, and then run off with all his property, then yeah, Christianity improves your chances of getting into heaven and reduces the chances of going to hell.
Certainly the Bible talks about people acting virtuously or evilly prior to the handing down of the Law, and well before Jesus.
>>Questioning faith: Discouraged. Sometimes even punished.
Not in my church. Oddly enough, they found that asking questions leads to deeper understandings of faith.
I don't think I ever heard my pastor growing up ever once utter the typical cop-out of "...well, it's a divine mystery," There's lots of things we don't know, naturally, but he was always ready to supply the best theories for these things.
>>It's also interesting to read his open letter to Coyne that is posted along with the video.
Yowza. If that's true (there was no prior agreement to release the video) then the atheist is basically guilty of stirring up an internet witch hunt against the guy.
It should really give all the atheists on Slashdot something to reflect upon... you all should think about how easily you were turned into a tool for an evil man's purposes, and contrast that against similar claims you make against religion.
>>Even Jesus seems to be a composite of lots of earlier pagan traditions
Given that the lion's share of what he talked about was based on the Old Testament, it's highly unlikely he's a pagan composite. The Expounding of the Law, etc., simply would be impossible to write from pagan sources.
>>The Pauline doctrine is a huge part of what broke my faith... to actually adhere to it you would have to essentially stop being human, and telling yourself that you were a worthless "sinner" over and over again and perpetually begging for forgiveness is incredibly damaging.
Eh, it's partly St. Paul, but a large part of it is the result of St. Augustine's philosophy that one "cannot not sin". Not all Christians buy into that belief. (Can one sin when in a brain-dead coma? I don't think so, personally.)
>>Even when I was still indoctrinated I noticed lots of inconsistencies in the New testament but I was conditioned not to ask questions and just accept it.
It's a shame. My church actively encouraged questioning, well, everything.
>>The people who believe in creationism will never be swayed away from it
Just as Dawkins is unlikely, in the middle of a debate, to go, "You know? You're right! God is real."
Hell, AJ Ayers couldn't be swayed from his famed atheism even after he had a deathbed encounter with God. Man's ego is a powerful thing.
No, the point of debates like these is for the audience, not the speakers. I've actually changed my mind on quite a few issues after listening to presumably well-informed people on each side of a debate argue with each other.
>>No wonder: religion has usually opposed arts and sciences
Obviously, being an atheist doesn't stop you from believing total nonsense. The Conflict Thesis (that Religion is naturally hostile to religionl) didn't come into existence until almost the 20th Century. This was not because people were all friendly to the Church up until then (the Protestants certainly were not), but because it required a certain amount of rewriting of the history. It's now considered inaccurate.
>>It's time for religion to be closed out from the scientific debate altogether.
Religion shouldn't be part of scientific debate, insofar as debating the actual science goes - we don't need to interview a bishop to find out if he thinks that neutrinos can go faster than light (unless the Bishop is a physics PhD working for the Vatican Observatory, perhaps.) The only interaction it should have with science is in the area of ethics.
You see humans as "a jumble of biological components", but I see them as entities worthy of possessing natural rights, that ought to be secure against deprivation.of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
>>If that is all that climategate amounts to, then ok. Some guy didn't want to broker a deal between the data owners and the 'skeptics'. So what?
Stop trying to excuse the actions of your team.
Science needs openness, and the Freedom of Information Act is a law of the land. Ignoring the latter (and conspiring with others to find ways to lie to dodge FOIA requests) was probably illegal, and harms the former.
It's certainly not the smoking gun that the AGW skeptic crowd hyped it to be, that's for sure.
Yeah. The last time I was in China, the government came through with a bulldozer and knocked down all the illegal street vendors on the road, then stopped an arrow straight superhighway through it. This was in the middle of the BFE mind you, but they gave no notice to the guys running the stands.
Was the closest thing I'd ever seen to SimCity in real life.