You realise that occam's razor is a completely flawed idea though right? "In the beginning god created the heavens and the earth" vs [insert 7 volumes of complex physics descriptions of the big bang through star formation through accretion disks to plate tectonics, vulcanism and atmosphere formation].
In this case the simple explanation is probably wrong. In fact, if you take Occam's razor to the extreme, you want to just start subscribing to the belief system know as nihilism, it is the simplest.
The example would be valid if the person you were testing said they could set a piece of paper sealing on fire in a vacuum with a match. Of course, if you were to test such a claim you would find that it doesn't hold up.
I was talking about over extrapolation of evidence. He proved that x people can't douse under y conditions. Yes it is like your example as well, but with me going on to say that because this person failed a to light a match in a vacuum this one time, that proves that it is impossible to ever light a match in a vacuum under any circumstances This clouds the issue though as people confuse the fact that it may be true with whether or not it is a correct logical result, this is why I used an example where the result is clearly false, so that the fallacy is easier to observe. The one instance does not prove the rule, even if the rule is known to be true. I also think that one could potentially design a match that produces it's own oxygen for combustion but I have never had a proper vacuum to play with so I have never had the opportunity to try.
I was arguing against his methodology, and you are trying to convince me that cancer exists? I know cancer exists. Either you missed my point or you are saying that you only need rigorous methodology when investigating things that are already established as fact, and that if the thing is unknown, then any old method is fine.
He claimed the latter, as you point out. Then 1001 Randi fanboys like billybob_jcv here claimed the former as being proven by the latter. If Randi ever claimed to be advancing scientific understanding of these theories then he is a charlatan too. But I don't think he claimed that. Just randoms on the internet.
This burden of proof argument is the greatest straw man argument that pseudoskeptics ever came up with. (Claim: A new statement of truth made about something, usually when the statement has yet to be verified. - wiktionary) Note that the definition is chronological, therefore the claim in the above example is indeed that god does not exist, as the churches claim came first. Alternate definitions sometimes mention consensus, ie the most popular view, which the church also had on their side. Who decides which side is claiming something and which side isn't? I might consider it an extraoridinary claim that god does't exist. In reality the burden of proof for two competing claims is on both parties to prove the superiority of their theory. Pseudoskeptics often use the negation as automatic support for their position, 'he claims god exists, that is a claim. Claiming god doesn't exist is simply the abscence of his theory and the default position'. But any claim can be formulated as the negation of another claim. You claim to exist. The negation of that is that you don't exist therefore you are making an extraordinary claim and I am not. So prove to me you exist...
Randi debunks indiviuals, not ideas. For this I commend him. There are too many charlatans, conmen and liars in the world and anyone who puts a few of them in their place deserves our respect. My problem is with those fanboys of his who keep claiming his 'findings' prove or disprove some scientific hypothesis. Stop it.
I had a friend who claimed to be able to drink glass of beer with his hands tied behind his back, i tested that claim and he failed. I have thereby debunked the theory that drinking beer is possible at all... wait what? He proved that those particular dousers claims were fraudulent. Any douser that claims to be able to find oil, gas, gold, gems (or explosives as the wiki page says) is automatically fraudulent. Scientists who support the idea that dousing may be something other than bunkum only support the theory for running water and ferromagnetic metals. Dousing is not the point however. Randi's methods are unscientific, his results are claimed to be scientific... = pseudoscience. I refer to such people as pseudoskeptics personally to separate them from the type of pseudoscientist who believes too much. Pseudoskeptics believe too little but use the same methodology to 'prove' their skepticism. You could use Randi's methods to prove that there is no such thing as cancer by finding ten people who claim to have cancer and showing that they actually don't. You could use this method to prove that there is no global warming by taking measurements in your own back yard and saying 'look the temperature is going down'
In short, Randi is a passable entertainer, if you watch his shows and are entertained, good for you. If you take anything he says or does as scientific evidence of anything whatsoever, you are as gullible as any scientologist astrologer.
Funny, I work in Germany as a German to English translator, so for me the reverse is true. If I take something written in German and rewrite it in English I get $10. Hope I am not losing weight too - I am already pretty skinny.
You have to buy the music on redigi or itunes to get it in their system, I think (correct me if I am wrong). Renaming the files and then selling them would result in you having gotten the music for free, but taking a small monetary risk that no one else wanted to buy them. If your goal is to get the music for free and you don't mind breaking the rules to achieve that, wouldn't you just use a torrent or a p2p application and leave the credit card in your wallet? Sure it is optimistic to assume that no one is doing it, but I don't think many pirates are dumb enough to sign up for a service that makes you jump through such hoops including paying for the music when it is so easy to get for it free elsewhere.
Not only that, wouldn't you want to hire a genius with 0 experience? (This is the amount of experience they will leave university with). I have been advocating this for ages. Not necessarily a computer simulation of the job, that seems unnecessary as you can test someone's abilities without one. In a call centre I would for example just get them to work a few hours and see how they do. But the principle of testing seems much more effective than relying on paperwork. I recently moved to Germany where you can't clean a toilet without the proper qualifications. I have an IT degree and while studying I learned that one can pass such a degree without actually being good at any of the skills taught. In addition I knew lot of people who could out program me in their sleep, who taught themselves while being bored of high school. If I was an employer I would want to hire those guys out of high school and avoid the university dilettantes. How? Easy: let anyone who claims to have the skills come in for testing. Give them a task: 'write a program that does this, you have 3 hours'. Read their code. I worked with a company that did this and it really worked. In my current situation I am tempted to simply photoshop my university degree to say that it certifies that I am God. That will (not) teach the Germans to rely on pieces paper.
And this single ancestral species, if known, would be classified under Parvorder: Catarrhini (apes). Humans not only evolved from apes, humans are apes. The main classification is based on not having a tail and being evolved in Africa. In fact most of the great apes are also classified as hominids.
It's us, the human beings, who have failed science.
Science stays the way it is. Scientific principles stay the way they are.
It's us, the human, who have failed to put enough effort to get to know Science and now we blame Science for failing us.
Ridiculous !!!
What!? We have failed science? By being too subjective and human i guess. Because real science is objective and independent of humans? You have reduced science to a religion. Stop it, science is not a religion, it is a tool. Part of having a tool is having a handle for the human hand to grasp, or a monitor for human eyes to view what is going on. What is this 'Science' that you praise and worship so? This omnipotent, omniscient, universal force the embodies all that is good and pure in the universe. Go start a church if you like, the word scientology is taken though, I usually use the word 'scientism' to describe your particular religion. Now go, and leave this discussion to the tool-using animals that wish to improve their tools.
Confirming this. A google.de news search for the the guy's name returns results from many European nations, especially Austria. Germany is conspicuously absent. Living in Germany at the moment I can also confirm in general that the German media is in the pocket of big business. They hide it better than most but if you look closely the evidence is there. Is there anything we can do to expose their lack of ethics?
The argument that the EU is evil because they removed Berlusconi from office seems sort of strange to me. He was a mob boss. If that is the worst example of EU conduct you can come up with they must be a fairly reasonable bunch.
Don't forget this is a 4th hand translated account we are getting here through the notoriously sensationalist media. There was probably a 30 page report in which the scientist outlined which optical effects could most likely result in such an effect on the image through camera error or heat distortion, and then a sentence like "there is a small possibility that the objects were moving of their own volition" which then got grabbed up and made the focus of a story. If you read something stupid in the media, try blaming the media first and the scientists only when you have seen 1) the evidence and 2) the actual conclusions of the scientist in their own words.
Careers can be ruined by this sort of thing, ignorant journalists and skeptical armchair scientists.
TPP doesn't need the US and Canada should be brave enough to propose direct negotiation with Australia, New Zealand, Brunei and Singapore.
As a New Zealander I can confidently say the the NZ government will only negotiate as the US government directs them too anyway. Australia will probably not be much different.
You can't have a functioning long-term economy in which people never get compensated for anything; people are trying to make a living, and they use the income to produce more contributions to society.
The point being that there probably should be an attempt made to hinder online piracy in some way. We can't just let it spiral completely out of control, to the point where it's no longer lucrative to produce anything.
While I agree with much of what you say, I must take issue with current modern views on money and art, which I find to be flawed. I myself produce art, mostly I am not paid for that. Sometimes I get paid, but then it is an hourly rate, not far above minimum wage. I am not complaining about this, it seems fair to me. I would of course prefer a higher hourly rate. My point is that you don't need copyright law to get compensated for things, copyright compensates you for doing nothing, it is only for what you have done in the past, or what your parents did in the past, or what the person who you bought the rights off did in the past. Piracy could never spiral to the point that it is not lucrative to produce anything. Assuming you meant information (copyright is unlikely to infringe on food production for example) the majority of great works of art were produced by people who did so for the love of their art. Some of them got paid and some of them didn't. But to suggest that we wouldn't have art if there were no copyright law is an insult to the millions of artists throughout history who have worked menial jobs to support their art, and never saw a penny. Vincent van Gogh sold one painting his entire life - to his brother, Bach worked mostly on commission and wasn't paid royalties, which is true for most of the classical composers of his day, and the painters, the architects, etc. I believe artists should get paid for their work, like every other kind of worker. Commission, wage, salary or sale of goods are all viable. Those that create art that no one will pay for (like van Gogh), also highly valuable work in many cases, should get social welfare. Name ten artists who don't get paid, and have their work heavily pirated - I bet you can't. Metallica? Oh wait, millionaires. Ubisoft 3d artists? Fairly well paid. My wife's brother? No one pirates his work. Total lack of correlation often suggest lack of causation.
Art is not business, if you want to make money go found a company or get a law degree. Every person that gives up on art because it won't make them rich, increases the average quality of art in the world.
Science doesn't have a definition of life to rethink. The best we have come up with is: "Living organisms undergo metabolism, maintain homeostasis, possess a capacity to grow, respond to stimuli, reproduce and, through natural selection, adapt to their environment in successive generations. More complex living organisms can communicate through various means.[1][5] A diverse array of living organisms (life forms) can be found in the biosphere on Earth, and the properties common to these organisms—plants, animals, fungi, protists, archaea, and bacteria—are a carbon- and water-based cellular form with complex organization and heritable genetic information." (wikipedia)
This is not a definition. It doesn't even claim that all conceivable or possible things that have these properties are life, and I would not discount the possibility of finding something that did not have one of these properties that still seems worthy of calling life. Maybe science should change its definition of asjkdhljkfg while we are at it. The 'definition' doesn't even say that life is carbon based or water based as the summary seems to suggest, rather it goes out of its way to stress that this is just true for what we have seen so far.
Way to make legitimate concerns about GM crops seem crazy. Focusing on the health effects and pretending that those are the only concerns of a minority of 'crazy' nay-sayers is horribly dishonest. A major part of the movement against GM is rational and fact based:
Firstly cross pollination, the environmental impacts of meddling in a system as complex as the biosphere in such a fundamental way are difficult to predict, and there are clear cases where cross pollination has happened so it is not an irrational fear.
Secondly, the further control of the world food market by corporations like monsanto who own the patents on food crops, and because of broken law, all the crops that get cross pollinated, has a major economic impact. The unchecked corporatism in the US is dangerous enough without it taking over the means of survival for the people of the world.
This study clears up nothing, there are legitimate concerns about GM, these are not addressed here in any way. Please don't paint everyone who has concerns about the safety of new technology with the anti-science brush.
For all those that think not voting is like boycotting all politicians - it isn't. If you don't vote everyone else's vote counts for a little bit more. The more people that don't vote out of protest, the closer the system comes to an aristocracy.
The correct way to protest is to make a 'no vote'. This is where you tick all the boxes, or none of them, or you write a message voicing your dissatisfaction on the ballot, or smear faeces or stick chewing gum on the ballot, or you vote for a joke candidate. True this may be difficult in the US where many places don't use paper ballots, and there are often no joke candidates (or at least none that are more of a joke than all the rest.) You should be advocating for an abstain box on electronic voting machines. Not voting is using your voice to agree with the people that do vote.
So Google is saying slashdot has a systemic problem with idiotic groupthink and it's skewed moderation?
I'm with Google on this.
While this is a problem on slashdot I can't see how "Allow trusted evaluators to transfer a 'quantity of authority' to like-minded 'contributing authorities', who in turn designate and delegate authority to additional like-minded contributing authorities" is going to improve that. The only difference here is that instead of mod points being delegated based on a computer algorithm, they will be delegated the moderators. If bias in the moderators is the issue to be solved, wouldn't this have the opposite effect? Wouldn't this amplify the bias? Wouldn't this system allow minority viewpoints to actively take over the moderation system? Slashdot is not perfect, but this proposal is worse.
Even massive improvements in wind/solar will not change the fact they cannot supply base load in all conditions
Or improvements in energy storage. Calling solar energy a pipe dream is absurd and ignorant, virtually all the worlds energy comes from the sun in one way or another (except nuclear and geothermal, they came from another sun). Sure the energy industry aren't having any wet dreams about the profitability of solar energy right now, but whether big industry has a hard on or not is no measure of the viability of future technology. You would have called the internet a pipe dream too.
Slashdot Mirror
You realise that occam's razor is a completely flawed idea though right? "In the beginning god created the heavens and the earth" vs [insert 7 volumes of complex physics descriptions of the big bang through star formation through accretion disks to plate tectonics, vulcanism and atmosphere formation].
In this case the simple explanation is probably wrong. In fact, if you take Occam's razor to the extreme, you want to just start subscribing to the belief system know as nihilism, it is the simplest.
All it will take is one "think of the children" campaign courtesy of the chronically ignorant to derail this.
Think of all the children that are killed by drunk/reckless drivers
The example would be valid if the person you were testing said they could set a piece of paper sealing on fire in a vacuum with a match. Of course, if you were to test such a claim you would find that it doesn't hold up.
I was talking about over extrapolation of evidence. He proved that x people can't douse under y conditions. Yes it is like your example as well, but with me going on to say that because this person failed a to light a match in a vacuum this one time, that proves that it is impossible to ever light a match in a vacuum under any circumstances This clouds the issue though as people confuse the fact that it may be true with whether or not it is a correct logical result, this is why I used an example where the result is clearly false, so that the fallacy is easier to observe. The one instance does not prove the rule, even if the rule is known to be true. I also think that one could potentially design a match that produces it's own oxygen for combustion but I have never had a proper vacuum to play with so I have never had the opportunity to try.
I was arguing against his methodology, and you are trying to convince me that cancer exists? I know cancer exists. Either you missed my point or you are saying that you only need rigorous methodology when investigating things that are already established as fact, and that if the thing is unknown, then any old method is fine.
He claimed the latter, as you point out. Then 1001 Randi fanboys like billybob_jcv here claimed the former as being proven by the latter. If Randi ever claimed to be advancing scientific understanding of these theories then he is a charlatan too. But I don't think he claimed that. Just randoms on the internet.
This burden of proof argument is the greatest straw man argument that pseudoskeptics ever came up with. (Claim: A new statement of truth made about something, usually when the statement has yet to be verified. - wiktionary) Note that the definition is chronological, therefore the claim in the above example is indeed that god does not exist, as the churches claim came first. Alternate definitions sometimes mention consensus, ie the most popular view, which the church also had on their side. Who decides which side is claiming something and which side isn't? I might consider it an extraoridinary claim that god does't exist. In reality the burden of proof for two competing claims is on both parties to prove the superiority of their theory. Pseudoskeptics often use the negation as automatic support for their position, 'he claims god exists, that is a claim. Claiming god doesn't exist is simply the abscence of his theory and the default position'. But any claim can be formulated as the negation of another claim. You claim to exist. The negation of that is that you don't exist therefore you are making an extraordinary claim and I am not. So prove to me you exist...
Randi debunks indiviuals, not ideas. For this I commend him. There are too many charlatans, conmen and liars in the world and anyone who puts a few of them in their place deserves our respect. My problem is with those fanboys of his who keep claiming his 'findings' prove or disprove some scientific hypothesis. Stop it.
I had a friend who claimed to be able to drink glass of beer with his hands tied behind his back, i tested that claim and he failed. I have thereby debunked the theory that drinking beer is possible at all... wait what? He proved that those particular dousers claims were fraudulent. Any douser that claims to be able to find oil, gas, gold, gems (or explosives as the wiki page says) is automatically fraudulent. Scientists who support the idea that dousing may be something other than bunkum only support the theory for running water and ferromagnetic metals. Dousing is not the point however. Randi's methods are unscientific, his results are claimed to be scientific... = pseudoscience. I refer to such people as pseudoskeptics personally to separate them from the type of pseudoscientist who believes too much. Pseudoskeptics believe too little but use the same methodology to 'prove' their skepticism. You could use Randi's methods to prove that there is no such thing as cancer by finding ten people who claim to have cancer and showing that they actually don't. You could use this method to prove that there is no global warming by taking measurements in your own back yard and saying 'look the temperature is going down'
In short, Randi is a passable entertainer, if you watch his shows and are entertained, good for you. If you take anything he says or does as scientific evidence of anything whatsoever, you are as gullible as any scientologist astrologer.
Funny, I work in Germany as a German to English translator, so for me the reverse is true. If I take something written in German and rewrite it in English I get $10. Hope I am not losing weight too - I am already pretty skinny.
You have to buy the music on redigi or itunes to get it in their system, I think (correct me if I am wrong). Renaming the files and then selling them would result in you having gotten the music for free, but taking a small monetary risk that no one else wanted to buy them. If your goal is to get the music for free and you don't mind breaking the rules to achieve that, wouldn't you just use a torrent or a p2p application and leave the credit card in your wallet? Sure it is optimistic to assume that no one is doing it, but I don't think many pirates are dumb enough to sign up for a service that makes you jump through such hoops including paying for the music when it is so easy to get for it free elsewhere.
Not only that, wouldn't you want to hire a genius with 0 experience? (This is the amount of experience they will leave university with). I have been advocating this for ages. Not necessarily a computer simulation of the job, that seems unnecessary as you can test someone's abilities without one. In a call centre I would for example just get them to work a few hours and see how they do. But the principle of testing seems much more effective than relying on paperwork. I recently moved to Germany where you can't clean a toilet without the proper qualifications. I have an IT degree and while studying I learned that one can pass such a degree without actually being good at any of the skills taught. In addition I knew lot of people who could out program me in their sleep, who taught themselves while being bored of high school. If I was an employer I would want to hire those guys out of high school and avoid the university dilettantes. How? Easy: let anyone who claims to have the skills come in for testing. Give them a task: 'write a program that does this, you have 3 hours'. Read their code. I worked with a company that did this and it really worked. In my current situation I am tempted to simply photoshop my university degree to say that it certifies that I am God. That will (not) teach the Germans to rely on pieces paper.
And this single ancestral species, if known, would be classified under Parvorder: Catarrhini (apes). Humans not only evolved from apes, humans are apes. The main classification is based on not having a tail and being evolved in Africa. In fact most of the great apes are also classified as hominids.
Science failed us?
Nope.
It's us, the human beings, who have failed science.
Science stays the way it is. Scientific principles stay the way they are.
It's us, the human, who have failed to put enough effort to get to know Science and now we blame Science for failing us.
Ridiculous !!!
What!? We have failed science? By being too subjective and human i guess. Because real science is objective and independent of humans? You have reduced science to a religion. Stop it, science is not a religion, it is a tool. Part of having a tool is having a handle for the human hand to grasp, or a monitor for human eyes to view what is going on. What is this 'Science' that you praise and worship so? This omnipotent, omniscient, universal force the embodies all that is good and pure in the universe. Go start a church if you like, the word scientology is taken though, I usually use the word 'scientism' to describe your particular religion. Now go, and leave this discussion to the tool-using animals that wish to improve their tools.
Confirming this. A google.de news search for the the guy's name returns results from many European nations, especially Austria. Germany is conspicuously absent. Living in Germany at the moment I can also confirm in general that the German media is in the pocket of big business. They hide it better than most but if you look closely the evidence is there. Is there anything we can do to expose their lack of ethics?
The argument that the EU is evil because they removed Berlusconi from office seems sort of strange to me. He was a mob boss. If that is the worst example of EU conduct you can come up with they must be a fairly reasonable bunch.
Don't forget this is a 4th hand translated account we are getting here through the notoriously sensationalist media. There was probably a 30 page report in which the scientist outlined which optical effects could most likely result in such an effect on the image through camera error or heat distortion, and then a sentence like "there is a small possibility that the objects were moving of their own volition" which then got grabbed up and made the focus of a story. If you read something stupid in the media, try blaming the media first and the scientists only when you have seen 1) the evidence and 2) the actual conclusions of the scientist in their own words.
Careers can be ruined by this sort of thing, ignorant journalists and skeptical armchair scientists.
I clicked the disable all adds button. How come I can still see this thread?
TPP doesn't need the US and Canada should be brave enough to propose direct negotiation with Australia, New Zealand, Brunei and Singapore.
As a New Zealander I can confidently say the the NZ government will only negotiate as the US government directs them too anyway. Australia will probably not be much different.
You can't have a functioning long-term economy in which people never get compensated for anything; people are trying to make a living, and they use the income to produce more contributions to society.
The point being that there probably should be an attempt made to hinder online piracy in some way. We can't just let it spiral completely out of control, to the point where it's no longer lucrative to produce anything.
While I agree with much of what you say, I must take issue with current modern views on money and art, which I find to be flawed. I myself produce art, mostly I am not paid for that. Sometimes I get paid, but then it is an hourly rate, not far above minimum wage. I am not complaining about this, it seems fair to me. I would of course prefer a higher hourly rate. My point is that you don't need copyright law to get compensated for things, copyright compensates you for doing nothing, it is only for what you have done in the past, or what your parents did in the past, or what the person who you bought the rights off did in the past. Piracy could never spiral to the point that it is not lucrative to produce anything. Assuming you meant information (copyright is unlikely to infringe on food production for example) the majority of great works of art were produced by people who did so for the love of their art. Some of them got paid and some of them didn't. But to suggest that we wouldn't have art if there were no copyright law is an insult to the millions of artists throughout history who have worked menial jobs to support their art, and never saw a penny. Vincent van Gogh sold one painting his entire life - to his brother, Bach worked mostly on commission and wasn't paid royalties, which is true for most of the classical composers of his day, and the painters, the architects, etc. I believe artists should get paid for their work, like every other kind of worker. Commission, wage, salary or sale of goods are all viable. Those that create art that no one will pay for (like van Gogh), also highly valuable work in many cases, should get social welfare. Name ten artists who don't get paid, and have their work heavily pirated - I bet you can't. Metallica? Oh wait, millionaires. Ubisoft 3d artists? Fairly well paid. My wife's brother? No one pirates his work. Total lack of correlation often suggest lack of causation.
Art is not business, if you want to make money go found a company or get a law degree. Every person that gives up on art because it won't make them rich, increases the average quality of art in the world.
Science doesn't have a definition of life to rethink. The best we have come up with is: "Living organisms undergo metabolism, maintain homeostasis, possess a capacity to grow, respond to stimuli, reproduce and, through natural selection, adapt to their environment in successive generations. More complex living organisms can communicate through various means.[1][5] A diverse array of living organisms (life forms) can be found in the biosphere on Earth, and the properties common to these organisms—plants, animals, fungi, protists, archaea, and bacteria—are a carbon- and water-based cellular form with complex organization and heritable genetic information." (wikipedia)
This is not a definition. It doesn't even claim that all conceivable or possible things that have these properties are life, and I would not discount the possibility of finding something that did not have one of these properties that still seems worthy of calling life. Maybe science should change its definition of asjkdhljkfg while we are at it. The 'definition' doesn't even say that life is carbon based or water based as the summary seems to suggest, rather it goes out of its way to stress that this is just true for what we have seen so far.
Way to make legitimate concerns about GM crops seem crazy. Focusing on the health effects and pretending that those are the only concerns of a minority of 'crazy' nay-sayers is horribly dishonest. A major part of the movement against GM is rational and fact based:
Firstly cross pollination, the environmental impacts of meddling in a system as complex as the biosphere in such a fundamental way are difficult to predict, and there are clear cases where cross pollination has happened so it is not an irrational fear.
Secondly, the further control of the world food market by corporations like monsanto who own the patents on food crops, and because of broken law, all the crops that get cross pollinated, has a major economic impact. The unchecked corporatism in the US is dangerous enough without it taking over the means of survival for the people of the world.
This study clears up nothing, there are legitimate concerns about GM, these are not addressed here in any way. Please don't paint everyone who has concerns about the safety of new technology with the anti-science brush.
Not only this but the energy to broadcast the signal so far might be hard to come by without sunlight
For all those that think not voting is like boycotting all politicians - it isn't. If you don't vote everyone else's vote counts for a little bit more. The more people that don't vote out of protest, the closer the system comes to an aristocracy.
The correct way to protest is to make a 'no vote'. This is where you tick all the boxes, or none of them, or you write a message voicing your dissatisfaction on the ballot, or smear faeces or stick chewing gum on the ballot, or you vote for a joke candidate. True this may be difficult in the US where many places don't use paper ballots, and there are often no joke candidates (or at least none that are more of a joke than all the rest.) You should be advocating for an abstain box on electronic voting machines. Not voting is using your voice to agree with the people that do vote.
So Google is saying slashdot has a systemic problem with idiotic groupthink and it's skewed moderation? I'm with Google on this.
While this is a problem on slashdot I can't see how "Allow trusted evaluators to transfer a 'quantity of authority' to like-minded 'contributing authorities', who in turn designate and delegate authority to additional like-minded contributing authorities" is going to improve that. The only difference here is that instead of mod points being delegated based on a computer algorithm, they will be delegated the moderators. If bias in the moderators is the issue to be solved, wouldn't this have the opposite effect? Wouldn't this amplify the bias? Wouldn't this system allow minority viewpoints to actively take over the moderation system? Slashdot is not perfect, but this proposal is worse.
Even massive improvements in wind/solar will not change the fact they cannot supply base load in all conditions
Or improvements in energy storage. Calling solar energy a pipe dream is absurd and ignorant, virtually all the worlds energy comes from the sun in one way or another (except nuclear and geothermal, they came from another sun). Sure the energy industry aren't having any wet dreams about the profitability of solar energy right now, but whether big industry has a hard on or not is no measure of the viability of future technology. You would have called the internet a pipe dream too.
And why does the American people still tolerate this again? Surely, in a democracy, every law should be in its people's best interest, no?
How sad is it that this got modded 'funny'. I am not laughing