I think it's funny that Microsoft is pushing to be the first to market with the next-gen system. For most generations, the first to market ends up being forgotten completely (for more information see Wikipedia:
The first of the current generation of video game systems was the Dreamcast.
The first of the generation before that (64 bit) was the Jaguar.
The first 8 bit system? Colecovision, which had the distinction of doing pretty good for an extremely short period of time untill the NES was released.
Actually, it looks to be almost a fluke that the Genesis did fairly well, considering that it was the first major player in the 32 bit market. And the Atari 2600 is probably too old to really compare, as the market has shifted vastly since then. So MS naysayers should be happy that MS is pushing for such an early release.
Nothing in Urine is converted. The urine acts as an electrolyte between sheets of copper and magnesium. Actually, urine doesn't even act as the electrolyte, the copper chloride impregnated in the paper does. The urine just dissolves the copper chloride and completes the circuit. Distilled water could be used here just fine.
I wouldn't want to see a hybrid that burns ethanol. It takes more than a barrel of oil to bring a barrel of ethanol to market. The inputs required (fertilizer, tractors, watering, getting to market, cracking grain, etc etc) actually means that ethanol is negatively efficient as an energy source. Now Biodiesel does has a slight net energy gain, but you actually lose out environmentally when you use ethanol as a fuel over gasoline. The only possible advantage of ethanol is that it would have less emissions in the city, except that the higher burning point of ethanol would just mean more NOx, not less. SOx would probably be reduced, except they get spread so far and wide in the atmosphere that the general effect of running your car on ethanol would probably be to increase smog/acid rain/other environmental problems.
Of course it's easuer to create ugly things instead of beatuful things. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder: every person has their own very specific, detailed idea of what true beauty is. Ugly is pretty much universal.
Also, "unnatural" movements are much more acceptable if the thing is supposed to be ugly. And you don't need to render such things as how the light changes as it plays over the skin which is moving ontop of the underlying skeletal and muscular systems. Oh, and you don't need to render very complex hair for ugly.
But the author did at least say that it is just a correlation. He said that it is possible that violent crime could have swung farther down if it wasn't for video games. What it does show is that video games have not caused the massive epidemic of violence that the media is crowing about. Although, school shootings are indeed up. But that's probably related more to monkey-see monkey-do crimes with the sensationalism of the columbine shootings than anything else, although I am not a sociologist and this is just my relatively uninformed opinion.
And why shouldn't they? English is supposedly one of the hardest languages to learn simply because of all the irregular forms. Why not standardize? Everyone knows what you mean when you say "pleaded." Keeping it complex just because that is the "proper" way without any actual improvement in communication ability is mere snobberey.
Hey, if video games really affected young minds, we would see more people running around popping pills and listening to electronic music. (okay, this was more relevant when raves were the big thing, but...)
From what I understand, the concept that the late 60's/early 70's was filled with hippie youth is actually a fairly big misconception. Yes, they were one of the loudest and most memorable groups, so they got a lot of attention. However, the culture only really thrived in a few small pockets. For instance the infamous haight-ashbury neighborhood is only a couple square miles. Yes, there were many pockets of hippy culture, particularilly around colleges and universities, but they definately did not make up the cultural majority of the time.
The vast majority of the people who became the impetus of the "me" generation were not former hippies. They were the squares in suits in business school, or the hardworking guy who started his own little business that took off big time.
Yes, there are going to be some people whose values change as they age, but it's also true that media focuses on the rebelious factions of youth, while older people are considered interesting because of their financial success. That, and it becomes a lot harder to fight against the man once you realize that you are, indeed the man. And mouths to feed that rely on you for guidance really changes your mind on punishment for what are percieved as wrong deeds.
To falsify ID, all you would have to do is show evidence that all of the sub-components could have evolved randomly and have been "naturally selected" independently of the whole.
Natural selection does not say that unused parts will not exist. They only get selected against if they reduce survivorship. Granted, those enzymes slightly reduce the effeciency of the organism as they have to be made which takes energy and amino acids and whatnot, but that does not necesarilly lead to the death of the organism. If efficiency was that big of a deal, a lot more of our DNA would actually code out to proteins.
And there is a big flip side to irreducable complexity... It assumes that the system was not at one time more complex, such that the part (enzyme, organ, organelle, whatever) would be able to evolve, thus making some of the older parts obsolete. Maybe those parts get selected agaist over time, or maybe they just kinda hang out cause they're not doing much harm. Think tonsils or your appendix. They are still there, but becoming more reduced over time. At one time they had a function, but something changed such that they have no function or at least very limited and redundant function, as having the organ there reduces survivorship through tonsilitis and appendicitis. An engineer or designer would have simply removed the part once it is no longer needed. Natural selection doesn't have that luxury, so things take a while to change.
Another aspect of genetics that give evolution a lot more flexibility is that DNA can cross between organisms through a large number of different mechanisms. Sometimes a viral host will pick up snippets of DNA and move it to a new host (one of the primary mechanisms behind genetic engineering.) Most of the time, this really doesn't change the genome of the new host, but given enough incidents it's bound to happen. A protein that served one function in one organism could serve a completely different function in another. The protein could fold in a different shape in the changed environment of the new organism or the DNA could actually code out to a different protein due to various editing mechanisms. Usually, these changes will be deleterious or at least non-functional, but on rare occasion they can be beneficial. Through sexual reproduction this new protein and the accompanying traits it confers can then be shuffled through the species untill it meets up with the right set of traits to significantly increase survivorship.
Oh, and there are a lot of proteins in our body which do not have a use that we know of. Granted, we might have just not found that use yet, but it is distincly possible that the protein just does nothing.
This satisfies to my satisfaction irreducible complex systems evolving. Although I doubt it will actually change anybody's mind over the ID/Evolution topic. IDers will just move on to the next hole in the existing theory, giving scientists that little kick to study something they wouldn't have otherwise studied and stitch up that hole.
That's not arguing, that's just grandstanding. So, this guy knew where to get 100 people who believe that they were "rescued by belief in a Creator God" and the day of the debate he said "hey, you have to bring someone who was saved by non-belief." People who stop drinking and don't have faith obviously won't attribute it to their non-belief. They just realized they needed to stop, and did.
First of all, many studies have been done comparing the effectiveness of religious treatment programs, in particular AA. People generally succeed just as often without these programs as they do with them. Many studies actually show the groups of people who enter faith based treatment programs have a higher rate of falling back to the bottle than people who do it on their own. It's just that people that keep abstaining know where to find each other, so from the inside it makes the program look more succesful than it actually is. They forget about all the people that stopped coming.
People claim that faith is harmless, but that is simply not true. The greatest atrocities have been commited in the name of god: 9/11 and related attrocities, the crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, witch trials, Israel/Palestine, Mayan's starting wars to get more prisoners for human sacrifice to their god (okay, this may have actually been the priests becoming addicted to the cocaine used in the sacrifice ceremony, but...) And the list goes on and on. And this is leaving out the big one to avoid invoking Godwin's Law. Simply put, having faith is not necesarilly a good thing for society.
And evolution doesn't have to be WORTH defending. It's just the way the world works. Period.
And just why doesn't evolution belong in the science classroom? True, much of the work is based on assumptions about previous forms, but this is based on known fossils. Similarities in for between current and extinct organisms is very good evidence for the validity of evolution. And evolution has been shown to happen ON A HUMAN TIMELINE. Microbial resistance to antibiotics, studies on yeast, changes in adult fish size due to fishing nets, changes in plumage color and pattern when populations of birds which historically were geographically isolated come together again. These are all direct evidence of evolution which are observable within a human lifetime, sometimes on the order of years or even months.
Yes, it is provable through scientific methods whether the bible is an accurate description of how the world works. If it is indeed perfect, there will be no internal inconsistancies.
Genesis, chapter 1:
19: And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
20: And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and
fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
21: And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
22: And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
23: And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
24: And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
25: And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
26: And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
Genesis, chapter 2:
18: And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.
19: And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every
fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
So, there is internal inconsistancy over whether God created fowl first of Man first. In chapter one, fowl were created on the fourth day while Man was created on the fifth day. In chapter two, Man names the fowl as they are created. This would only be possible if man was created before fowl. It would also be able to use the order of the text to imply that gen: 1 claims beasts were made before man while gen: 2 claims otherwise, but that is not as cut and dry in its inconsistancy.
Therefore, while not necesarilly disproving God, or even whether the bible is divinly inspired, I have at least proved that the bible is flawed. Nice thing about science is that when flaws are discovered, they are examined and so then theories are either extended or discarded. Science is alslo fine with the fact that humans don't know everything yet. In fact, not knowing everything (yet) is the only reason to use science to try to find out more. Religion, however, will bluntly state that it is right, and that anyone who disagrees with them is wrong. Even when the religious point of view is proven wrong.
Arguing against a scientific theory using science should be allowed in public schools.
Once I see a SCIENTIFIC argument against evolution, I will consider giving it some thought. ID is patently untestable, therefore unscientific.
This is not a seperation of Church and State issue
Therefore ID is based on faith and faith alone, and so is therefore a religious topic. Seperation of church and state definately comes into play.
One other point... if the theories individually do raise questions in evolution wouldn't presentation of some of the best of them, and the scientific-establishments best counter-argument/explanation be a great way to teach students how to logically analyze an argument and determine if it is well-formed or not?
I guess that teaching ID in the classrom in this method would be a good idea. Actually allow students to rationally critique ID and come to the conclusion that it has nothing to do with science. Then the American Youth will give up on the whole concept if ID and realize that it, and everything else the neo-cons are pushing, is simply a fairy tale.
Now, if someone can actually show me an irreducible complexity that can not be explained through evolution, or comes up with a mathematical formula explaining why intelligence needs to be driving evolution, then maybe I'll give ID a serious consideration. But I've been looking through basic ID teachings and see nothing more than religious fiat.
Honestly, the universe is not actually infinite. Yes, it extends farther than we will ever be able to gather data from (in theory) but it does have boundaries. Otherwise all this talk about the universe expanding would be irrelevant.
There was a student in my high school physics class who could see a bit into the IR. The teacher had a presentation and had something that we shouldn't have been able to see, but the kid could see it. Although I'm guessing that he wasn't tetrachromatic so much as just had a slight offset in the red receptor pigment. I think it would be trivial for a small mutation to change the pigment. IIRC, organic pigments are "tuned" to a particular frequency by a protein chain that hangs off the main cluster which alters the harmonic frequency, similar to how a longer guitar string will have a lower resonant harmonic frequency.
Corn also takes lots of diesel to harvest, plant and fertilize and heat and energy to extract. Oh, and that fertilizer is usually made using petroleum. In addition to energy needed to pump water to the fields. It's currently estimated that to get one barrel of ethanol to market, we need to use one and a half barrels of petroleum in the process. Sure, some technological and process advances will allow us to cut that down, and I believe that biodiesel is alot closer to the break-even point than pure ethanol, but we're still a ways off from being able to actually run an energy economy off of it. For comparison I believe it currently takes about one barrel of oil to get thirty barrels of oil to market. This used to be about one hundred barrels of oil to market for every barrel used in production, but alot of the easy to get oil is now gone. And we're shipping oil much further than we used to.
Yes, the Chinese are free to run their own country. Just as shareholders should be free to tell the company they own what to do. And that corporation should feel free to not do businuess with China if the shareholders don't want it to.
Shareholders are the owners of the company. Within reason, they can collectively use this power to further any agenda they want, be it political, environmental or the usual financial. From Wikipedia: In the United States most cooperatives are corporations or limited liability companies. Co-ops can further the agenda of getting organic food out to the people who want it, providing low cost housing to members, or simply sharing access to automobiles to reduce environmental impact. I for one am glad that these shareholders aren't just passing the buck on this issue. Heck, I'm happy to see the investors taking responsibility on any issue like this. Although one can still suspect that there are alterior financial motives, but it could be as simply as good PR in an industry that considers access to information to be important enough to boycot, or at least choose a competitor's product, because of their involvement in China.
Winter really shouldn't be affected; they're just debating whether to extend it a couple weeks to a month in each direction. Won't be much of a savings, but it's there. I believe they're also doing a study into whether or not DST actually saves any energy, so it's nice to see this is hopefully going to based on science or at least stats.
Slashdot Mirror
Tthis use of the unapproved term "bad" is triple-plus-ungood. It is my duty to report you to the Ministry of Truth. That is all.
I think it's funny that Microsoft is pushing to be the first to market with the next-gen system. For most generations, the first to market ends up being forgotten completely (for more information see Wikipedia:
The first of the current generation of video game systems was the Dreamcast.
The first of the generation before that (64 bit) was the Jaguar.
The first 8 bit system? Colecovision, which had the distinction of doing pretty good for an extremely short period of time untill the NES was released.
Actually, it looks to be almost a fluke that the Genesis did fairly well, considering that it was the first major player in the 32 bit market. And the Atari 2600 is probably too old to really compare, as the market has shifted vastly since then. So MS naysayers should be happy that MS is pushing for such an early release.
Nothing in Urine is converted. The urine acts as an electrolyte between sheets of copper and magnesium. Actually, urine doesn't even act as the electrolyte, the copper chloride impregnated in the paper does. The urine just dissolves the copper chloride and completes the circuit. Distilled water could be used here just fine.
I wouldn't want to see a hybrid that burns ethanol. It takes more than a barrel of oil to bring a barrel of ethanol to market. The inputs required (fertilizer, tractors, watering, getting to market, cracking grain, etc etc) actually means that ethanol is negatively efficient as an energy source. Now Biodiesel does has a slight net energy gain, but you actually lose out environmentally when you use ethanol as a fuel over gasoline. The only possible advantage of ethanol is that it would have less emissions in the city, except that the higher burning point of ethanol would just mean more NOx, not less. SOx would probably be reduced, except they get spread so far and wide in the atmosphere that the general effect of running your car on ethanol would probably be to increase smog/acid rain/other environmental problems.
Of course it's easuer to create ugly things instead of beatuful things. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder: every person has their own very specific, detailed idea of what true beauty is. Ugly is pretty much universal.
Also, "unnatural" movements are much more acceptable if the thing is supposed to be ugly. And you don't need to render such things as how the light changes as it plays over the skin which is moving ontop of the underlying skeletal and muscular systems. Oh, and you don't need to render very complex hair for ugly.
But the author did at least say that it is just a correlation. He said that it is possible that violent crime could have swung farther down if it wasn't for video games. What it does show is that video games have not caused the massive epidemic of violence that the media is crowing about. Although, school shootings are indeed up. But that's probably related more to monkey-see monkey-do crimes with the sensationalism of the columbine shootings than anything else, although I am not a sociologist and this is just my relatively uninformed opinion.
And why shouldn't they? English is supposedly one of the hardest languages to learn simply because of all the irregular forms. Why not standardize? Everyone knows what you mean when you say "pleaded." Keeping it complex just because that is the "proper" way without any actual improvement in communication ability is mere snobberey.
Amen to that. I remember seeing some videos of her getting royally pissed at a game, but can't seem to find em.
Hey, if video games really affected young minds, we would see more people running around popping pills and listening to electronic music. (okay, this was more relevant when raves were the big thing, but...)
From what I understand, the concept that the late 60's/early 70's was filled with hippie youth is actually a fairly big misconception. Yes, they were one of the loudest and most memorable groups, so they got a lot of attention. However, the culture only really thrived in a few small pockets. For instance the infamous haight-ashbury neighborhood is only a couple square miles. Yes, there were many pockets of hippy culture, particularilly around colleges and universities, but they definately did not make up the cultural majority of the time.
The vast majority of the people who became the impetus of the "me" generation were not former hippies. They were the squares in suits in business school, or the hardworking guy who started his own little business that took off big time.
Yes, there are going to be some people whose values change as they age, but it's also true that media focuses on the rebelious factions of youth, while older people are considered interesting because of their financial success. That, and it becomes a lot harder to fight against the man once you realize that you are, indeed the man. And mouths to feed that rely on you for guidance really changes your mind on punishment for what are percieved as wrong deeds.
To falsify ID, all you would have to do is show evidence that all of the sub-components could have evolved randomly and have been "naturally selected" independently of the whole.
Natural selection does not say that unused parts will not exist. They only get selected against if they reduce survivorship. Granted, those enzymes slightly reduce the effeciency of the organism as they have to be made which takes energy and amino acids and whatnot, but that does not necesarilly lead to the death of the organism. If efficiency was that big of a deal, a lot more of our DNA would actually code out to proteins.
And there is a big flip side to irreducable complexity... It assumes that the system was not at one time more complex, such that the part (enzyme, organ, organelle, whatever) would be able to evolve, thus making some of the older parts obsolete. Maybe those parts get selected agaist over time, or maybe they just kinda hang out cause they're not doing much harm. Think tonsils or your appendix. They are still there, but becoming more reduced over time. At one time they had a function, but something changed such that they have no function or at least very limited and redundant function, as having the organ there reduces survivorship through tonsilitis and appendicitis. An engineer or designer would have simply removed the part once it is no longer needed. Natural selection doesn't have that luxury, so things take a while to change.
Another aspect of genetics that give evolution a lot more flexibility is that DNA can cross between organisms through a large number of different mechanisms. Sometimes a viral host will pick up snippets of DNA and move it to a new host (one of the primary mechanisms behind genetic engineering.) Most of the time, this really doesn't change the genome of the new host, but given enough incidents it's bound to happen. A protein that served one function in one organism could serve a completely different function in another. The protein could fold in a different shape in the changed environment of the new organism or the DNA could actually code out to a different protein due to various editing mechanisms. Usually, these changes will be deleterious or at least non-functional, but on rare occasion they can be beneficial. Through sexual reproduction this new protein and the accompanying traits it confers can then be shuffled through the species untill it meets up with the right set of traits to significantly increase survivorship.
Oh, and there are a lot of proteins in our body which do not have a use that we know of. Granted, we might have just not found that use yet, but it is distincly possible that the protein just does nothing.
This satisfies to my satisfaction irreducible complex systems evolving. Although I doubt it will actually change anybody's mind over the ID/Evolution topic. IDers will just move on to the next hole in the existing theory, giving scientists that little kick to study something they wouldn't have otherwise studied and stitch up that hole.
Talk to any anthropologist. He can refer you to lots of those skeletons. They are in the ground, and many have been dug up.
That's not arguing, that's just grandstanding. So, this guy knew where to get 100 people who believe that they were "rescued by belief in a Creator God" and the day of the debate he said "hey, you have to bring someone who was saved by non-belief." People who stop drinking and don't have faith obviously won't attribute it to their non-belief. They just realized they needed to stop, and did.
First of all, many studies have been done comparing the effectiveness of religious treatment programs, in particular AA. People generally succeed just as often without these programs as they do with them. Many studies actually show the groups of people who enter faith based treatment programs have a higher rate of falling back to the bottle than people who do it on their own. It's just that people that keep abstaining know where to find each other, so from the inside it makes the program look more succesful than it actually is. They forget about all the people that stopped coming.
People claim that faith is harmless, but that is simply not true. The greatest atrocities have been commited in the name of god: 9/11 and related attrocities, the crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, witch trials, Israel/Palestine, Mayan's starting wars to get more prisoners for human sacrifice to their god (okay, this may have actually been the priests becoming addicted to the cocaine used in the sacrifice ceremony, but...) And the list goes on and on. And this is leaving out the big one to avoid invoking Godwin's Law. Simply put, having faith is not necesarilly a good thing for society.
And evolution doesn't have to be WORTH defending. It's just the way the world works. Period.
Laws are facets of the world that can be explained with an equation. The theory comes in trying to exaplain why those laws hold true.
And just why doesn't evolution belong in the science classroom? True, much of the work is based on assumptions about previous forms, but this is based on known fossils. Similarities in for between current and extinct organisms is very good evidence for the validity of evolution. And evolution has been shown to happen ON A HUMAN TIMELINE. Microbial resistance to antibiotics, studies on yeast, changes in adult fish size due to fishing nets, changes in plumage color and pattern when populations of birds which historically were geographically isolated come together again. These are all direct evidence of evolution which are observable within a human lifetime, sometimes on the order of years or even months.
So, there is internal inconsistancy over whether God created fowl first of Man first. In chapter one, fowl were created on the fourth day while Man was created on the fifth day. In chapter two, Man names the fowl as they are created. This would only be possible if man was created before fowl. It would also be able to use the order of the text to imply that gen: 1 claims beasts were made before man while gen: 2 claims otherwise, but that is not as cut and dry in its inconsistancy.
Therefore, while not necesarilly disproving God, or even whether the bible is divinly inspired, I have at least proved that the bible is flawed. Nice thing about science is that when flaws are discovered, they are examined and so then theories are either extended or discarded. Science is alslo fine with the fact that humans don't know everything yet. In fact, not knowing everything (yet) is the only reason to use science to try to find out more. Religion, however, will bluntly state that it is right, and that anyone who disagrees with them is wrong. Even when the religious point of view is proven wrong.
Arguing against a scientific theory using science should be allowed in public schools.
Once I see a SCIENTIFIC argument against evolution, I will consider giving it some thought. ID is patently untestable, therefore unscientific.
This is not a seperation of Church and State issue
Therefore ID is based on faith and faith alone, and so is therefore a religious topic. Seperation of church and state definately comes into play.
One other point... if the theories individually do raise questions in evolution wouldn't presentation of some of the best of them, and the scientific-establishments best counter-argument/explanation be a great way to teach students how to logically analyze an argument and determine if it is well-formed or not?
I guess that teaching ID in the classrom in this method would be a good idea. Actually allow students to rationally critique ID and come to the conclusion that it has nothing to do with science. Then the American Youth will give up on the whole concept if ID and realize that it, and everything else the neo-cons are pushing, is simply a fairy tale.
Now, if someone can actually show me an irreducible complexity that can not be explained through evolution, or comes up with a mathematical formula explaining why intelligence needs to be driving evolution, then maybe I'll give ID a serious consideration. But I've been looking through basic ID teachings and see nothing more than religious fiat.
Honestly, the universe is not actually infinite. Yes, it extends farther than we will ever be able to gather data from (in theory) but it does have boundaries. Otherwise all this talk about the universe expanding would be irrelevant.
There was a student in my high school physics class who could see a bit into the IR. The teacher had a presentation and had something that we shouldn't have been able to see, but the kid could see it. Although I'm guessing that he wasn't tetrachromatic so much as just had a slight offset in the red receptor pigment. I think it would be trivial for a small mutation to change the pigment. IIRC, organic pigments are "tuned" to a particular frequency by a protein chain that hangs off the main cluster which alters the harmonic frequency, similar to how a longer guitar string will have a lower resonant harmonic frequency.
Because those assets were essentially stolen from Novell in the first place by SCO selling liscenses against their contract with Novell?
Well, it's the most efficient way to go to the moon or another planet, AFAIK
Corn also takes lots of diesel to harvest, plant and fertilize and heat and energy to extract. Oh, and that fertilizer is usually made using petroleum. In addition to energy needed to pump water to the fields. It's currently estimated that to get one barrel of ethanol to market, we need to use one and a half barrels of petroleum in the process. Sure, some technological and process advances will allow us to cut that down, and I believe that biodiesel is alot closer to the break-even point than pure ethanol, but we're still a ways off from being able to actually run an energy economy off of it. For comparison I believe it currently takes about one barrel of oil to get thirty barrels of oil to market. This used to be about one hundred barrels of oil to market for every barrel used in production, but alot of the easy to get oil is now gone. And we're shipping oil much further than we used to.
Yes, the Chinese are free to run their own country. Just as shareholders should be free to tell the company they own what to do. And that corporation should feel free to not do businuess with China if the shareholders don't want it to.
Shareholders are the owners of the company. Within reason, they can collectively use this power to further any agenda they want, be it political, environmental or the usual financial. From Wikipedia: In the United States most cooperatives are corporations or limited liability companies. Co-ops can further the agenda of getting organic food out to the people who want it, providing low cost housing to members, or simply sharing access to automobiles to reduce environmental impact. I for one am glad that these shareholders aren't just passing the buck on this issue. Heck, I'm happy to see the investors taking responsibility on any issue like this. Although one can still suspect that there are alterior financial motives, but it could be as simply as good PR in an industry that considers access to information to be important enough to boycot, or at least choose a competitor's product, because of their involvement in China.
Winter really shouldn't be affected; they're just debating whether to extend it a couple weeks to a month in each direction. Won't be much of a savings, but it's there. I believe they're also doing a study into whether or not DST actually saves any energy, so it's nice to see this is hopefully going to based on science or at least stats.