That's about the size of it. Science isn't getting things wrong any more than usual. In fact, it tends to be even more accurate than usual as there's a much larger and much faster avenue for peer revue via the internet.
It's people who try to present themselves as doing science, who ignore or dismiss any contradictory evidence that refutes their conclusions, that are getting things wrong all the time and always have. It's just that these days it's a lot easier to find someone with some supposed repute (like the media or politicians) to widely disseminate bad science as fact.
In short, science has become more like a religion to the general public to support their faith in whatever reality they'd like to believe in rather than the systemic study of observable evidence to form a complete conclusion or theory it should be. If you want to believe the moon is made of cheese, you'll likely be able to find some source that purports to have done science that proves the moon is in fact made of a mixture of many types of exotic gourmet cheeses and that any reports to the contrary are part of a vast government conspiracy to artificially maintain exorbitant cheese prices..
It's way too late to keep modified genes out of the environment. Every plant on Earth has already been fouled by genes modified through selective breeding and the use of chemical and radioactive substances to force mutations.
Virtually every item of produce in your local Whole Foods was created by human intervention, not nature. The corn we buy is vastly different than the natural plant man developed it from, teosinte. The same goes for beets, carrots, corn, beans & potatoes, to name just a few. The originals are either inedible, poisonous or so poorly suited to agriculture we'd all starve to death if farmers didn't grow the modified versions.
Over time, we turned grey wolves into french poodles. Given enough time Monsanto could likely have bred plants that are immune to Round-Up as well. But a business plan that requires a few hundred years of selective breeding and forced mutation to have a good chance of obtaining and stabilizing the desired genetic profile wouldn't be a sustainable business plan in modern society. Plus, with modern methods there's less risk the resulting plant will have unfavorable genes like the one that makes wild almonds astringent tasting and poisonous instead of non-toxic and delicious like our selectively bred versions.
If Obama was doing to do anything of real merit, he'd have moved to have pot taken off schedule 1 at the very least to allow for real medical investigation of the plant.
If he had wanted to do more, he could have put it to the states to decide.
Obama doesn't have the power to do any of those things. That's Congress' show. Despite the rhetoric, Obama isn't a dictator with unlimited power.
If the feds re-schedule it before there is enough public support than you will see a bunch of outraged state legislators quickly moving to make it illegal at state level, to "protect our children" of course.
Yeah. The feds have mostly left the legal marijuana industry alone. They will of course jump on anyone who goes outside what the laws allow, like those that think it's ok to ship cannabis to other states or countries or who aren't operating within the law in some other manner. Enforcing laws between states and foreign countries is what the Feds are supposed to do. Doing it isn't violating the administration's stance. With only a couple of exceptions, mostly cases that were likely already in progress when the announcement was made, no one who was raided has been prosecuted for anything that was legal under state law. A few are up for weapons charges, a few are up for illegally transporting cannabis across state lines, a few for distributing cannabis via USPS, a few for distribution of non-cannabis drugs and a few were suspected to have foreign cartel ties.
AliExpress is irrelevant to investors. Alibaba owns the Chinese equivalents of Ebay, Amazon and Paypal. That's the part they're interested in. That, and Alibaba's B2B sales. I know several local clothing stores, ecig retailers, mall kiosks & boutique shops which get all their stock almost exclusively via Alibaba.com and I'm sure there's a ton of places I don't know about that do the same. The same applies online. Half the stuff on Ebay and Amazon's marketplace likely come from Alibaba suppliers (many of them use images with alibaba watermarks ffs) so investing gets an investor a small piece of the US retail market as well.
Federal Article III Judges may rubber stamp warrants for Government law enforcement, but state and local judges are either elected or appointed by elected officials . A judge at that level who rubber stamps warrants is taking a big risk for almost no promise of a reward. A judge can make cops work a little harder to establish solid probable cause with little risk of consequence while a judge who routinely enables cops to do things like tear apart some innocent old couple's home looking for drugs based on a tip that turns out to be a crank call is not likely to get reelected or reappointed when their term ends. It does happen of course, but it's a lot more rare than people seem to think it is.
As for cops, there were over 460,000 local cops in the US in 2010. According to the National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project, In 2010 there was 6,613 officers accused of misconduct. Of those, only about 3000 were accused of on-the-job misconduct towards citizens (the rest were things like domestic violence, drug use, or DUI committed while off duty that still violate police codes of conduct). The rate of perpetrators of violent crime among normal citizens was 429.4 per 100k while among cops it was 409.3 per 100k,
Cops are utterly average in how "bold" they are compared to regular citizens. They're just people doing an extremely necessary job for which they get paid crap, are exposed to constant risks and get nothing but disrespect and derision from those they work for in return. I'm amazed more of them aren't complete assholes.
The cops already had some kind of information or evidence that the person was in possession of child pornography. Whatever it was, it was enough to convince the judge probable cause existed. That information or evidence was is what the judge went on when he issued them a search warrant to look for it.
Since the cops were specifically looking for child porn, memory sticks would certainly be a part of the search warrant. Since that's what they were looking for, they were going to look to see what was on it no matter where it was found. Leaving it on a desk would only have made it easier for them to get their hands on it. By hiding it there was at least a chance the cops wouldn't find it. And he might have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for that meddling memory sniffing dog.
Cox has limits in their ToS, but they very, very rarely enforce them.
I got an email every month for over a year that I'd gone over as I always went way over my 250gb cap, often by 2x-3x. 2 teens with Netflix and Hulu accounts, Steam, Youtube... it adds up quick. But I never once got anything more than an automated e-mail when I went over the cap. I did end up getting one of their home office plans last year (which they've apparently recently discontinued offering) since in my area it was the same price for the same speeds (25/5), without any data caps and with business class service (I can, and have, had a truck here within an hour at 3am to fix an outage).
I've heard that some people have had service suspended where they have to call to get it reactivated; but that seems to mostly be relegated to when they detect people's bandwidth being used nefariously without their knowledge and is used more to force people to call in so they can be walked through doing a virus scan. So far anyway. They're likely just waiting for TW and/or Comcast to jump through all the hoops first before they start trying to milk the caps themselves.
Farther north and your weekend is filled with the sounds of snowblowers and chainsaws, the ping of salt and gravel bouncing off of undercarriages and windshields, the scrape and roar of plows etc...
I started in the central valley of California but temps up to 120F in Summer, where opening your front door felt like getting punched in the face by an angry fire god, got annoying. So I moved to Northern Pennsylvania and found that shoveling 2 feet of snow every morning to get the car out of the driveway, spending all night listening to the sound of trees exploding from -20 temps and having to don 80lbs of clothing before opening the front door got annoying even faster.
So I moved to the midsouth. Temps rarely go beyond 100F for more than a couple days at a time in summer, very rarely go below 0 in winter and a couple inches of snow shuts down the entire region. And if bikinis are your thing, you can always find a fat woman in a bikini at 3am in the local Walmart winter or summer!:)
So what about those of us who refuse a smartphone for various reasons? I wouldn't mind having one but I'm not going to shell out another $20/month for internet on a device that I mainly use in a place where I already pay for the internet.
They'll obviously give you the option of having a physical credit card.... for $20/month extra.
And did/will you go out and get a Ph.D. in Infant Nutrition before you have a child and need to feed them? Be sure to pick up a degree in math, science and English while you're at it so you can be qualified to help them with their homework.
They aren't looking for funding to build a bridge, they just want to make a campy little entertainment program to encourage kids to read.
Some things require training and expertise to do well. God help our species if getting kids to read is one of things.
It seems to be "density of neighborhoods". Places with lots of multistory apartment buildings, subdivisions, etc tend to be cheaper than places where you'll commonly see a residential house flanked by a warehouse and a 7-11.
Local competition of course drives prices down. The price per Mb in Omaha and Vegas are over $3 where the only real competition is wireless carriers but it's well under $3 in Phoenix where Cox has competition from Cable One. Of course there's numerous other factors, from easement restrictions to local infrastructure to geography, that can also affect the price or offerings.
A more apt analogy is you're that alcoholic and you have a friend who has been given permission to enter your home. He finds out that while you were drunk, you made a lecherous pass at his sister and so, in anger, he comes in when you are drunk and takes pictures of you covered in vomit passed out on your bathroom floor and then starts passing them around to your friends, family, coworkers and the Internet.
Do you really believe your poor judgement in giving him consent to enter your home and then doing something to anger him gives him the right to use even worse judgement in abusing that consent in an attempt to defame you to the entire world?
Not to interrupt your rambling Limbaugh fellating, but Cox doesn't spread costs across their entire customer base. They use regional pricing based on the cost of serving that area, in theory anyway. I'm sure that in reality, they charge whatever they think they can get from the people in that area. But areas with more densely packed residential areas do tend to have lower prices and don't seem to significantly subsidize service offerings in less densely packed areas which usually have higher prices.
No. It's just that "The big AV firms are using the same old scare tactics to try and shift the market away from their old AV products to their new "Data Loss Prevention" products." isn't news to most/.ers. It was inevitable. PC users have plenty of AV available for free or cheap and few of the typical tablets or phone users have much use for AV as they don't root their devices and don't sideload apps they get from torrents found on a Chinese forum so AV companies see the writing on the wall. *YAWN*Steak is a far more worthy and interesting topic.
Ahhhh. Classic French Fine dining. Where in about 80% of the restaurants the motto is "We serve you horribly over seasoned food that's soaked in butter and olive oil then cooked by walking it through a warm room, charge you $80 because we make it look pretty on the plate and then when you tell us it's inedible we have some Belgiun waiter tell you that you that if you weren't an uncultured oaf you'd enjoy eating food that tastes like horse shit."
I'm on context, you should take some. Like most people do these days you chose to ignore context and decided you could be confident in judging my stance on an issue based on limited information. Which is the same thing the media and politicians do to make surveys like these to get far more attention than they deserve.
The point I was arguing against, is that a theory shouldn't be held believed to be fact unless it's disproven as that just makes Science another name for God for people wrapped in a delusion that they're not religious.
We teach what we know to the limits of our knowledge. If you don't like it, get to work disproving it. I know you'll never believe me, but if you could actually back any of your opinions with real data you could get published and become famous.
Has science proven that God doesn't exist? Has science proven that everything we observe is real and wasn't just *poofed* into being by God 4000 years ago? Is that rock really 4 billion years old or did God just make it in a way that we'd think it was as some part of His grand plan? By your "if you can't disprove it, we should teach it" logic, Texas has it right and we should be teaching religion in schools as science.
Until it can survive without the host, a fetus is a parasitic infection. Denying the right to abort because that infection will eventually spawn a living human being is almost as silly as denying people the right to take anti-biotics because someday those bacteria could one day evolve into a higher life form.
As I recall, one of the strongest opponents of liberalizing drug laws in California was the prison guards' union. It was pretty clear that they wanted to keep the prisons full to protect their jobs.
Not quite. Their jobs are safe either way as California (and most other states) has far more prisoners than they have capacity. What they are interested in is protecting themselves as a prison full of non-violent offenders who can look forward to getting out relatively soon if they behave is far safer for guards than a prison full of violent felons who will remain in prison for decades no matter how they behave. Police unions usually oppose drug law liberalization for similar reasons.
And yet the climate change sensationalists will CLING to the idea that studies like this aren't as useless as doing studies in an effort to convince the Pope to become an Atheist. I don't need a study to know that there will be people who either don't care, are incapable of grasping the issue or are purposely duplicitous. The purpose of studies like this are not to convince climate change deniers. Really, at this point studies like this are only a way for scientist to exploit Climate Sensationalists for grant money.
Those who can be convinced climate change is occurring already have been. What few have been convinced of is what should be done to address it. We have been convinced however, that the sensationalists' theories that driving a an electric car full of batteries that have to plugged into an electrical socket every night, putting solar panels on their roof (and more batteries in their home) that are made by some Chinese factory that produces millions of pounds of toxic waste each year and/or tightening emissions regulations in countries that already have such regulations in place and enforce them isn't going to do anything significantly positive to stop or reverse global warming worth the likely significant negative impact they would have.
Of course they're telling the truth. They just aren't telling the whole story.
"No, we didn't exploit the Heartbleed bug. You're accusing us of stealing a Ford Focus when we've got garages full of Ferraris and F-16s. Puh-lease! Why would we bother exploiting something that gives such rudimentary and fleeting access to data and could just as easily be used by the Chinese or Russians when we have the espionage skills and resources available to us to install our own secure backdoors that only we can use and give ourselves full, unrestricted access to everything on any system we want access to?"
Prop 8 violated Civil Rights. Specifically, the right to enter into a contract, which isn't a basic human right.
Marriage, so far as Government entities are concerned, is just a contract. Under Prop 8 they could still get married, they just couldn't get their marriage contract recognized by their State Government. Which means they would not be granted the legal privileges and responsibilities such a contract affords. But under US law, denying a person the right to enter into a contract based on their gender (or national origin, race, color, religion, disability or familial status) is a violation of the Civil Rights granted to every citizen. Prop 8 would have violated that by denying people the civil right to enter into a contract based solely on gender. As a CEO, supporting contract discrimination based on gender was directly relevant to his job duties so of course it was an issue.
Free speech is a right. You can't lose your right to claim free speech. Ever. Even hate speech is protected. But, as he was reminded, the right to speak freely only protects people from consequences imposed by Government. Employers, customers, investors and the general public are not the Government and the first amendment doesn't guarantee any protection from them.
Slashdot Mirror
Stop watching idiots.
That's about the size of it. Science isn't getting things wrong any more than usual. In fact, it tends to be even more accurate than usual as there's a much larger and much faster avenue for peer revue via the internet.
It's people who try to present themselves as doing science, who ignore or dismiss any contradictory evidence that refutes their conclusions, that are getting things wrong all the time and always have. It's just that these days it's a lot easier to find someone with some supposed repute (like the media or politicians) to widely disseminate bad science as fact.
In short, science has become more like a religion to the general public to support their faith in whatever reality they'd like to believe in rather than the systemic study of observable evidence to form a complete conclusion or theory it should be. If you want to believe the moon is made of cheese, you'll likely be able to find some source that purports to have done science that proves the moon is in fact made of a mixture of many types of exotic gourmet cheeses and that any reports to the contrary are part of a vast government conspiracy to artificially maintain exorbitant cheese prices..
It's way too late to keep modified genes out of the environment. Every plant on Earth has already been fouled by genes modified through selective breeding and the use of chemical and radioactive substances to force mutations.
Virtually every item of produce in your local Whole Foods was created by human intervention, not nature. The corn we buy is vastly different than the natural plant man developed it from, teosinte. The same goes for beets, carrots, corn, beans & potatoes, to name just a few. The originals are either inedible, poisonous or so poorly suited to agriculture we'd all starve to death if farmers didn't grow the modified versions.
Over time, we turned grey wolves into french poodles. Given enough time Monsanto could likely have bred plants that are immune to Round-Up as well. But a business plan that requires a few hundred years of selective breeding and forced mutation to have a good chance of obtaining and stabilizing the desired genetic profile wouldn't be a sustainable business plan in modern society. Plus, with modern methods there's less risk the resulting plant will have unfavorable genes like the one that makes wild almonds astringent tasting and poisonous instead of non-toxic and delicious like our selectively bred versions.
How much do you pay for the air you are breathing? Now imagine most goods and services are like that. This is where things start "growing on trees".
Ain't gonna happen, and your analogy is false. Nobody has ever paid for air, but they have paid for food.
Scuba divers, welders, athletes, people with medical issues and fad businesses like Oxygen bars routinely exchange money for air.
If Obama was doing to do anything of real merit, he'd have moved to have pot taken off schedule 1 at the very least to allow for real medical investigation of the plant.
If he had wanted to do more, he could have put it to the states to decide.
Obama doesn't have the power to do any of those things. That's Congress' show. Despite the rhetoric, Obama isn't a dictator with unlimited power.
If the feds re-schedule it before there is enough public support than you will see a bunch of outraged state legislators quickly moving to make it illegal at state level, to "protect our children" of course.
Precisely.
Yeah. The feds have mostly left the legal marijuana industry alone.
They will of course jump on anyone who goes outside what the laws allow, like those that think it's ok to ship cannabis to other states or countries or who aren't operating within the law in some other manner. Enforcing laws between states and foreign countries is what the Feds are supposed to do. Doing it isn't violating the administration's stance.
With only a couple of exceptions, mostly cases that were likely already in progress when the announcement was made, no one who was raided has been prosecuted for anything that was legal under state law. A few are up for weapons charges, a few are up for illegally transporting cannabis across state lines, a few for distributing cannabis via USPS, a few for distribution of non-cannabis drugs and a few were suspected to have foreign cartel ties.
That's called a government.
AliExpress is irrelevant to investors. Alibaba owns the Chinese equivalents of Ebay, Amazon and Paypal. That's the part they're interested in.
That, and Alibaba's B2B sales. I know several local clothing stores, ecig retailers, mall kiosks & boutique shops which get all their stock almost exclusively via Alibaba.com and I'm sure there's a ton of places I don't know about that do the same. The same applies online. Half the stuff on Ebay and Amazon's marketplace likely come from Alibaba suppliers (many of them use images with alibaba watermarks ffs) so investing gets an investor a small piece of the US retail market as well.
Federal Article III Judges may rubber stamp warrants for Government law enforcement, but state and local judges are either elected or appointed by elected officials . A judge at that level who rubber stamps warrants is taking a big risk for almost no promise of a reward. A judge can make cops work a little harder to establish solid probable cause with little risk of consequence while a judge who routinely enables cops to do things like tear apart some innocent old couple's home looking for drugs based on a tip that turns out to be a crank call is not likely to get reelected or reappointed when their term ends. It does happen of course, but it's a lot more rare than people seem to think it is.
As for cops, there were over 460,000 local cops in the US in 2010. According to the National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project, In 2010 there was 6,613 officers accused of misconduct. Of those, only about 3000 were accused of on-the-job misconduct towards citizens (the rest were things like domestic violence, drug use, or DUI committed while off duty that still violate police codes of conduct). The rate of perpetrators of violent crime among normal citizens was 429.4 per 100k while among cops it was 409.3 per 100k,
Cops are utterly average in how "bold" they are compared to regular citizens. They're just people doing an extremely necessary job for which they get paid crap, are exposed to constant risks and get nothing but disrespect and derision from those they work for in return. I'm amazed more of them aren't complete assholes.
The cops already had some kind of information or evidence that the person was in possession of child pornography. Whatever it was, it was enough to convince the judge probable cause existed. That information or evidence was is what the judge went on when he issued them a search warrant to look for it.
Since the cops were specifically looking for child porn, memory sticks would certainly be a part of the search warrant. Since that's what they were looking for, they were going to look to see what was on it no matter where it was found. Leaving it on a desk would only have made it easier for them to get their hands on it. By hiding it there was at least a chance the cops wouldn't find it.
And he might have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for that meddling memory sniffing dog.
Cox has limits in their ToS, but they very, very rarely enforce them.
I got an email every month for over a year that I'd gone over as I always went way over my 250gb cap, often by 2x-3x. 2 teens with Netflix and Hulu accounts, Steam, Youtube... it adds up quick. But I never once got anything more than an automated e-mail when I went over the cap. I did end up getting one of their home office plans last year (which they've apparently recently discontinued offering) since in my area it was the same price for the same speeds (25/5), without any data caps and with business class service (I can, and have, had a truck here within an hour at 3am to fix an outage).
I've heard that some people have had service suspended where they have to call to get it reactivated; but that seems to mostly be relegated to when they detect people's bandwidth being used nefariously without their knowledge and is used more to force people to call in so they can be walked through doing a virus scan. So far anyway. They're likely just waiting for TW and/or Comcast to jump through all the hoops first before they start trying to milk the caps themselves.
Farther north and your weekend is filled with the sounds of snowblowers and chainsaws, the ping of salt and gravel bouncing off of undercarriages and windshields, the scrape and roar of plows etc... :)
I started in the central valley of California but temps up to 120F in Summer, where opening your front door felt like getting punched in the face by an angry fire god, got annoying. So I moved to Northern Pennsylvania and found that shoveling 2 feet of snow every morning to get the car out of the driveway, spending all night listening to the sound of trees exploding from -20 temps and having to don 80lbs of clothing before opening the front door got annoying even faster.
So I moved to the midsouth. Temps rarely go beyond 100F for more than a couple days at a time in summer, very rarely go below 0 in winter and a couple inches of snow shuts down the entire region. And if bikinis are your thing, you can always find a fat woman in a bikini at 3am in the local Walmart winter or summer!
So what about those of us who refuse a smartphone for various reasons? I wouldn't mind having one but I'm not going to shell out another $20/month for internet on a device that I mainly use in a place where I already pay for the internet.
They'll obviously give you the option of having a physical credit card.... for $20/month extra.
And did/will you go out and get a Ph.D. in Infant Nutrition before you have a child and need to feed them? Be sure to pick up a degree in math, science and English while you're at it so you can be qualified to help them with their homework.
They aren't looking for funding to build a bridge, they just want to make a campy little entertainment program to encourage kids to read.
Some things require training and expertise to do well. God help our species if getting kids to read is one of things.
It seems to be "density of neighborhoods". Places with lots of multistory apartment buildings, subdivisions, etc tend to be cheaper than places where you'll commonly see a residential house flanked by a warehouse and a 7-11.
Local competition of course drives prices down. The price per Mb in Omaha and Vegas are over $3 where the only real competition is wireless carriers but it's well under $3 in Phoenix where Cox has competition from Cable One. Of course there's numerous other factors, from easement restrictions to local infrastructure to geography, that can also affect the price or offerings.
A more apt analogy is you're that alcoholic and you have a friend who has been given permission to enter your home. He finds out that while you were drunk, you made a lecherous pass at his sister and so, in anger, he comes in when you are drunk and takes pictures of you covered in vomit passed out on your bathroom floor and then starts passing them around to your friends, family, coworkers and the Internet.
Do you really believe your poor judgement in giving him consent to enter your home and then doing something to anger him gives him the right to use even worse judgement in abusing that consent in an attempt to defame you to the entire world?
Not to interrupt your rambling Limbaugh fellating, but Cox doesn't spread costs across their entire customer base.
They use regional pricing based on the cost of serving that area, in theory anyway. I'm sure that in reality, they charge whatever they think they can get from the people in that area. But areas with more densely packed residential areas do tend to have lower prices and don't seem to significantly subsidize service offerings in less densely packed areas which usually have higher prices.
No. It's just that "The big AV firms are using the same old scare tactics to try and shift the market away from their old AV products to their new "Data Loss Prevention" products." isn't news to most /.ers.
It was inevitable. PC users have plenty of AV available for free or cheap and few of the typical tablets or phone users have much use for AV as they don't root their devices and don't sideload apps they get from torrents found on a Chinese forum so AV companies see the writing on the wall.
*YAWN*Steak is a far more worthy and interesting topic.
Ahhhh. Classic French Fine dining. Where in about 80% of the restaurants the motto is "We serve you horribly over seasoned food that's soaked in butter and olive oil then cooked by walking it through a warm room, charge you $80 because we make it look pretty on the plate and then when you tell us it's inedible we have some Belgiun waiter tell you that you that if you weren't an uncultured oaf you'd enjoy eating food that tastes like horse shit."
I'm on context, you should take some.
Like most people do these days you chose to ignore context and decided you could be confident in judging my stance on an issue based on limited information. Which is the same thing the media and politicians do to make surveys like these to get far more attention than they deserve.
The point I was arguing against, is that a theory shouldn't be held believed to be fact unless it's disproven as that just makes Science another name for God for people wrapped in a delusion that they're not religious.
We teach what we know to the limits of our knowledge. If you don't like it, get to work disproving it. I know you'll never believe me, but if you could actually back any of your opinions with real data you could get published and become famous.
Has science proven that God doesn't exist? Has science proven that everything we observe is real and wasn't just *poofed* into being by God 4000 years ago? Is that rock really 4 billion years old or did God just make it in a way that we'd think it was as some part of His grand plan? By your "if you can't disprove it, we should teach it" logic, Texas has it right and we should be teaching religion in schools as science.
Until it can survive without the host, a fetus is a parasitic infection. Denying the right to abort because that infection will eventually spawn a living human being is almost as silly as denying people the right to take anti-biotics because someday those bacteria could one day evolve into a higher life form.
As I recall, one of the strongest opponents of liberalizing drug laws in California was the prison guards' union. It was pretty clear that they wanted to keep the prisons full to protect their jobs.
Not quite. Their jobs are safe either way as California (and most other states) has far more prisoners than they have capacity.
What they are interested in is protecting themselves as a prison full of non-violent offenders who can look forward to getting out relatively soon if they behave is far safer for guards than a prison full of violent felons who will remain in prison for decades no matter how they behave. Police unions usually oppose drug law liberalization for similar reasons.
And yet the climate change sensationalists will CLING to the idea that studies like this aren't as useless as doing studies in an effort to convince the Pope to become an Atheist.
I don't need a study to know that there will be people who either don't care, are incapable of grasping the issue or are purposely duplicitous. The purpose of studies like this are not to convince climate change deniers. Really, at this point studies like this are only a way for scientist to exploit Climate Sensationalists for grant money.
Those who can be convinced climate change is occurring already have been. What few have been convinced of is what should be done to address it.
We have been convinced however, that the sensationalists' theories that driving a an electric car full of batteries that have to plugged into an electrical socket every night, putting solar panels on their roof (and more batteries in their home) that are made by some Chinese factory that produces millions of pounds of toxic waste each year and/or tightening emissions regulations in countries that already have such regulations in place and enforce them isn't going to do anything significantly positive to stop or reverse global warming worth the likely significant negative impact they would have.
Of course they're telling the truth. They just aren't telling the whole story.
"No, we didn't exploit the Heartbleed bug. You're accusing us of stealing a Ford Focus when we've got garages full of Ferraris and F-16s. Puh-lease! Why would we bother exploiting something that gives such rudimentary and fleeting access to data and could just as easily be used by the Chinese or Russians when we have the espionage skills and resources available to us to install our own secure backdoors that only we can use and give ourselves full, unrestricted access to everything on any system we want access to?"
Prop 8 violated Civil Rights. Specifically, the right to enter into a contract, which isn't a basic human right.
Marriage, so far as Government entities are concerned, is just a contract. Under Prop 8 they could still get married, they just couldn't get their marriage contract recognized by their State Government. Which means they would not be granted the legal privileges and responsibilities such a contract affords.
But under US law, denying a person the right to enter into a contract based on their gender (or national origin, race, color, religion, disability or familial status) is a violation of the Civil Rights granted to every citizen. Prop 8 would have violated that by denying people the civil right to enter into a contract based solely on gender. As a CEO, supporting contract discrimination based on gender was directly relevant to his job duties so of course it was an issue.
Free speech is a right. You can't lose your right to claim free speech. Ever. Even hate speech is protected. But, as he was reminded, the right to speak freely only protects people from consequences imposed by Government. Employers, customers, investors and the general public are not the Government and the first amendment doesn't guarantee any protection from them.