His opinion seems predominantly about how to deal with it, not whether or not it's happening. Despite the science being on their side, there are quite a lot of environmentalists that approach this issue with something more along the lines of uneducated fervor. (The same is true of the anti-warming crowd, too.)
Dyson's a long-standing dissenter on whatever is readily available to dissent on. His tree suggestions is fairly typical -- theoretically interesting, but practically unviable.
I have to agree with you here -- in many cases, people react much more harshly than the law. Unfortunate, since they don't put nearly as much effort into investigation.
You can be charged for bringing false accusations against someone, particularly if it causes them harm.
Half of our local police blotter reads like that. Seriously: "Responded to a call regarding children on the individual's lawn. Children had since moved along."
Why don't you read the articles yourself instead of making up conclusions?
Or you could brush up on your English skills. Since others were characterized as "an arrest actually occurred", it's reasonably to think that "nothing" must refer at least to outcomes less than arrest.
That one person at one point called the police over innocuous photographs is not a point. You can call the cops over all sorts of unreasonable and pointless things. As it is their job and they aren't psychic enough to guess that it's innocuous, they show up and investigate.
If you read your local police blotter, you'll notice that calling the cops about X, where X is completely harmless and calling the cops was unwarranted, is very common.
So, of those five: two are nothing more than speculation, two are stories where in the end, nothing at all happened, and one actually has a small collection of anecdotes where people have been arrested for innocuous photographs.
Sans statistics, you can't guess at how common this is, but the selection of anecdotes suggests it's quite rare (and, since the law is subject to interpretation, bound to happen).
I think the real story here is that the prosecutor is applying a law in a situation far from its intended application and in a situation where it is likely to cause more harm to the victim and to society than it will help.
In most jurisdictions, if you go to trial rather than take a deal (which is uncommon), they don't have a good case unless they can demonstrate either that you were distributing the material or that you received it with intent. In the scenario you described, your lawyer would be able to show from your pattern of behavior what your intent was and that this material was acquired accidentally without intent.
No, it can be considered pornography if they are only nude. However, it's not true that all nude photographs are then necessarily considered pornographic. (Despite what wiseasses on Slashdot say about pictures of one's own very young children.) Unfortunately, the distinction is strictly defined -- it's pornographic if it's of prurient intent, which people may disagree on.
That's right -- close sources are relatively powerful. While I have no idea if a pacemaker would be affected by a big enough solar flare, the EM fields for solar flares are actually quite weak. The only reason they can induce havoc is that the field exists over an enormous area (the whole earth), so it can include currents in enormous circuits (power lines) that would never see significant induction from human-scale EM fields.
If people are waiting 12 months for the one place that makes these transformers to churn them out one at a time, they deserve to die. Build them -- or something close enough to get things working again -- everywhere remotely capable at once. There's enormous incentive to do just that.
No, they failed to prevent this financial crisis. (Though you could equally claim that they succeeded in preventing it from being worse than it is.) However, they take quite a lot of financial precautions.
It's not fine for school, either. A lot of the most important stuff is how the compiler, runtime, and OS work. I have to agree that there are far too many of these guys.
I mean, most guys couldn't even tell you why an NX memory page bit is no godsend on a von Neumann machine, especially when it has unsandboxed interpreted languages.
You can't walk down the street without a camera following you.
I'm quite skeptical about this being as generally true as you make it out to be.
You can't visit websites with nudity or other "harmful" material (censorship of the right to expression).
Visiting websites isn't actually exercising a right to expression. Barring such websites from being run might be considered such, yes. Expression is solely on the speaker's end, not the reader's.
You don't have a right to a trial by your peers (three strikes and you lose ISP access).
Like it or not, ISP access is not a right. They are not punishing you for a crime, so you haven't lost any right to trial. It may be underhanded, you may not like it, but it has nothing to do with a right to trial.
and soon I wouldn't be surprised if they make diets mandatory for people with BMI>25 (as has happened in Japan), or else get fined.
No good rights tirade is complete without a slippery slope argument at the end.
Well, in (3), the decay product is not necessarily significantly lighter nor stabler. In the long run, though, the natural decay chains end in stable products that are substantially lighter than the original materials.
Also, some of the "unnatural" transmutation methods are quite natural; they just occur so rarely without intervention that they're not significant.
The only real danger I've seen is labeling your work "cold fusion" -- which you should not do if you want to be taken seriously. (Similar to how, if you were to come up with a legitimate scientific curriculum for grade schools, using the term "intelligent design" anywhere will not help people take you seriously.)
Nearly all of these "cold fusion" projects are easy enough to write off as nonsense on objective scientific grounds. Nobody has suggested a mechanism for action that has any reasonable physical basis, nor demonstrated that such a mechanism exists. Sometimes they conjure up theories that have neither experimental confirmation nor a reasonable physical mechanism (which means it's a worthless theory), or they build a single device that has some weird behavior, which isn't physics research.
Why should anyone believe you when you can't even get your units right? (You're off by a unit of time, not to mention that the amount of energy released by an atomic weapon varies by about two orders of magnitude.)
Slashdot Mirror
His opinion seems predominantly about how to deal with it, not whether or not it's happening. Despite the science being on their side, there are quite a lot of environmentalists that approach this issue with something more along the lines of uneducated fervor. (The same is true of the anti-warming crowd, too.)
Dyson's a long-standing dissenter on whatever is readily available to dissent on. His tree suggestions is fairly typical -- theoretically interesting, but practically unviable.
I have to agree with you here -- in many cases, people react much more harshly than the law. Unfortunate, since they don't put nearly as much effort into investigation.
You can be charged for bringing false accusations against someone, particularly if it causes them harm.
Half of our local police blotter reads like that. Seriously: "Responded to a call regarding children on the individual's lawn. Children had since moved along."
Why don't you read the articles yourself instead of making up conclusions?
Or you could brush up on your English skills. Since others were characterized as "an arrest actually occurred", it's reasonably to think that "nothing" must refer at least to outcomes less than arrest.
That one person at one point called the police over innocuous photographs is not a point. You can call the cops over all sorts of unreasonable and pointless things. As it is their job and they aren't psychic enough to guess that it's innocuous, they show up and investigate.
If you read your local police blotter, you'll notice that calling the cops about X, where X is completely harmless and calling the cops was unwarranted, is very common.
So, of those five: two are nothing more than speculation, two are stories where in the end, nothing at all happened, and one actually has a small collection of anecdotes where people have been arrested for innocuous photographs.
Sans statistics, you can't guess at how common this is, but the selection of anecdotes suggests it's quite rare (and, since the law is subject to interpretation, bound to happen).
I think the real story here is that the prosecutor is applying a law in a situation far from its intended application and in a situation where it is likely to cause more harm to the victim and to society than it will help.
In most jurisdictions, if you go to trial rather than take a deal (which is uncommon), they don't have a good case unless they can demonstrate either that you were distributing the material or that you received it with intent. In the scenario you described, your lawyer would be able to show from your pattern of behavior what your intent was and that this material was acquired accidentally without intent.
They called the police and what? Your story stops dead there, and I bet I can guess why.
No, it can be considered pornography if they are only nude. However, it's not true that all nude photographs are then necessarily considered pornographic. (Despite what wiseasses on Slashdot say about pictures of one's own very young children.) Unfortunately, the distinction is strictly defined -- it's pornographic if it's of prurient intent, which people may disagree on.
That's right -- close sources are relatively powerful. While I have no idea if a pacemaker would be affected by a big enough solar flare, the EM fields for solar flares are actually quite weak. The only reason they can induce havoc is that the field exists over an enormous area (the whole earth), so it can include currents in enormous circuits (power lines) that would never see significant induction from human-scale EM fields.
If people are waiting 12 months for the one place that makes these transformers to churn them out one at a time, they deserve to die. Build them -- or something close enough to get things working again -- everywhere remotely capable at once. There's enormous incentive to do just that.
No, they failed to prevent this financial crisis. (Though you could equally claim that they succeeded in preventing it from being worse than it is.) However, they take quite a lot of financial precautions.
You'd think people would divert significantly more resources into building new transformers.
It's not fine for school, either. A lot of the most important stuff is how the compiler, runtime, and OS work. I have to agree that there are far too many of these guys.
I mean, most guys couldn't even tell you why an NX memory page bit is no godsend on a von Neumann machine, especially when it has unsandboxed interpreted languages.
Enriched manure? It's fertilizer, not manure. And farmers can get their hands on hundreds of pounds of ammonium nitrate without any trouble.
Of course it does, but it's fairly easy to differentiate from human DNA.
You can't walk down the street without a camera following you.
I'm quite skeptical about this being as generally true as you make it out to be.
You can't visit websites with nudity or other "harmful" material (censorship of the right to expression).
Visiting websites isn't actually exercising a right to expression. Barring such websites from being run might be considered such, yes. Expression is solely on the speaker's end, not the reader's.
You don't have a right to a trial by your peers (three strikes and you lose ISP access).
Like it or not, ISP access is not a right. They are not punishing you for a crime, so you haven't lost any right to trial. It may be underhanded, you may not like it, but it has nothing to do with a right to trial.
and soon I wouldn't be surprised if they make diets mandatory for people with BMI>25 (as has happened in Japan), or else get fined.
No good rights tirade is complete without a slippery slope argument at the end.
It's legitimate, but it's also not peer-reviewed.
Well, in (3), the decay product is not necessarily significantly lighter nor stabler. In the long run, though, the natural decay chains end in stable products that are substantially lighter than the original materials.
Also, some of the "unnatural" transmutation methods are quite natural; they just occur so rarely without intervention that they're not significant.
Green
Henry
Maxwell
Josephson
The only real danger I've seen is labeling your work "cold fusion" -- which you should not do if you want to be taken seriously. (Similar to how, if you were to come up with a legitimate scientific curriculum for grade schools, using the term "intelligent design" anywhere will not help people take you seriously.)
Nearly all of these "cold fusion" projects are easy enough to write off as nonsense on objective scientific grounds. Nobody has suggested a mechanism for action that has any reasonable physical basis, nor demonstrated that such a mechanism exists. Sometimes they conjure up theories that have neither experimental confirmation nor a reasonable physical mechanism (which means it's a worthless theory), or they build a single device that has some weird behavior, which isn't physics research.
here is enough energy from the sun hitting one square mile on the earth
This is power.
the energy released from two atomic nukes exploding
This is energy.
Can't compare them. Unit problem.
Why should anyone believe you when you can't even get your units right? (You're off by a unit of time, not to mention that the amount of energy released by an atomic weapon varies by about two orders of magnitude.)
The fact that you're running in a hypervisor is only detectable by a timing attack.
They get into SMM from kernel mode, but they modify the SMM functions, which is not something you generally can do from kernel mode.