While most of your post is perfectly reasonable, I'd take issue with this bit:
"...My commercial choices don't "make" Hollywood, or other people, anything. People are dumb now, have been in the future, and always will be. Most of the "most popular" shows / movies, I've never seen in my life.
And, yes, everything "we" do is fucked up. That's why it takes the few who SEE that to come along and fix it - for themselves at first, and others later..."
First: So you don't watch movies? You don't pay your money to rent a dvd or go to a theater? Because if you don't think your dollars (or pounds, or euros, or whatever) are a method of 'voting', you're sadly mistaken. Studios are profit-making entities, seeking the largest profit for the least effort possible: your 'votes' tell them where that profit is. Your commercial choices most certainly do have a (small, proportional) impact.
Your second paragraph is more troubling. The problem is that EITHER something is driven democratically, or it isn't. And if we establish that the bulk of the people are stupid, then we're resigned to either a) bad policies driven by the democratic but bovine masses, or b) non-democratic action, driven by the visionaries that see "what needs to be done, despite what the masses want, for the good of all".
Of course, this latter group isn't necessarily people you agree with, and could be a label applied to 19th century missionaries, eco-terrorists, or George W Bush/Dick Cheney. I could go further, but I don't want to invoke Godwin's Law.
We have EXACTLY the governments we collectively wanted. Their policies reflect, largely, the desires of their masses. The moment some narcissist starts spouting that they "know better than everyone" is the moment I start checking my wallet, my rights, and my rights. The conflict between my personal beliefs and what governments tend to do is why I generally believe in WEAKER centralized power...but again, I'm outvoted by the collective around me who prefers a society ringed with safety nets.
"...if the civil rights movement picks him as a symbol, it will only hurt their cause..."
That's rarely stopped them.
Malcom X Black Panthers Al Sharpton Jesse Jackson Tawana Brawley OJ Simpson Crystal Gail Mangum
Seriously, the race card seems to be at the top of the deck, and the first one played (along with the victim card) in any conceivable circumstance. Which of course then cheapens ACTUAL incidences of racism, and makes people generally more skeptical and less likely to care.
"The government" broke it, and "we" have to fix it, eh? Remember, WE are the ones that elected this government, and all the previous ones. (And don't give me the crap about "all they give us is fake choices - this system is an evolution of what we've asked for...) Remember, WE are the ones who vote in such elections at a what, sub-50% rate? Remember, WE are the ones who, through our commercial choices have made Hollywood and television the engine of derivative, repetitive, simplistic, stupid entertainments.
I don't know about you, but just about everything "we" do is pretty fucked up. The odds that something positive is accomplished by a herd of humans is approximately 1/(2^(# of people involved)).
Personally, I'm finding Mr Schneier less practically relevant and more of an attention-whore every year.
If I did, what would indolent pedants have to post about?
Or are you asserting that the difference between a tenth of a percent, and a hundredth, a thousandth, and/or a ten-thousandth MATERIALLY affects the point I was making?
At least the first 6 posts here said "OMG, they wanted all this information to show me my data!"...
Well, geniuses, considering that both Miller's article and the original NY Times article said "....Having filled out an identity verification form that asked for his name, birth date, address and the last four digits of his Social Security number..." personally, I wasn't terribly surprised that they asked for my name, birth date, address and the last four digits of my Social Security number.
Secondly, while I certainly agree that whatever you put into that form ends up going into their database as well, I'd like to pose a stupid question: how ELSE are they going to identify the person requesting the data? I mean, if all I had to put in was my name, then ANYONE could get the data they're about to show me, right? Personally, I strongly suspect that this is more to protect their assets from competitive gathering (after all, data is their business), but one could charitably interpret that this is a REASONABLE step to keep the information they have away from casually-prying eyes that are not the person indicated.
FWIW, it said my information was invalid, and I'd have to be manually identified (and this is all with absolutely correct entries). The second time I tried, it said there's already a user with that email. So, clearly a beta.
And a note to Ron: with a 5-minute scan of your "about Ron Miller" and a listing of articles, I can tell your probable politics - you're an Apple consumer, after all. FYI the fact that you *assert* you don't affiliate with a party also tells me volumes; it doesn't ipso facto mean that you don't in FACT align with a given party, either. And re your question, I guess I'd take the opposite view: while I know by correcting the information, I'm enhancing the value of their product, I'm going to get ads all the time anyway so I'd rather they be relevant.
Of course if they were all being WASTED by some giant space-cannon from a single galactic source, that might be a reason they're all aligned similarly too...but none of the astronomers will talk about THAT, will they?
The fact is, for the western world, risk is largely eliminated. Plague, famine, pestilence, and war - all are pretty nonexistent in the civilized world.
We evolved to deal with immediate, natural risk.
I'd suspect that the human brain is rather good at this in the aggregate - witness, for example, the breadth of 'home remedies' or natural herbs etc that have been determined to actually have some sort of core chemical that (surprising to scientists) actually DOES have a beneficial effect.
So now we're reduced to worry, more than risk-management. Rather than facing starvation, we worry that we're eating too much. Rather than facing working day and night to barely survive, we worry that we're too sedentary. Rather than face the constant risk of agonizing death from the billions of germs trying to kill us like Typhus and Diptheria, we worry that there *might* be a vanishingly small cumulative risk of cancer from the additives that make our food safe from spoilage, mold, etc. Rather than facing the imminent pillage, rape, or murder by a neighbor village that's decided we have something they want, we worry that there might be some crazy zealot somewhere who might harbor some resentment vaguely against our society.
Seriously, I suspect that worry is endemic to the human creature. If we don't have actual things to be concerned about, we invent / inflate them to fill that psychological space.
The semifinals are averaging 50-80,000 viewers. The races just off San Francisco with the most effete/trendy/hipster crowd imaginable, averaged 800-900,000.
This is somewhere around the ratings received by NBC's "Last Call" at midnight.
This is a marginal sport irrelevant to 99.9999% of the population, and in which the only participants are giant conglomerates or kajillionaires. Granted, formula one racing, etc are likewise only for the big-money teams, but pretty much everyone drives. Sailing as a regular activity is already a marginal sport performed only by the tiniest rind of enthusiasts, that 'pro sailing' is like the margin of the margin of the margin. I don't doubt that it takes tremendous ability, intelligence, and teamwork. It's just that the bulk of us can neither see it nor appreciate it if we could.
The point is that - at least according to news reports - the only thing that Global Warming does is BAD things, when in reality for every species LOSING some of its range, another species is GAINING range. And it's logically not just "good" animals dying and "bad" animals thriving - that's just inane.
My point is that yes, if all you're looking to report is that the sky is falling, that's all you're going to see.
And you don't think Tina Fey's parody was politically motivated? Yes, SNL parodies both sides of the fence, but only barely and much of the mockery of Democrats seems motivated more by the Fairness Doctrine than by humor.
In honesty, not much in the last decade of SNL could be claimed to be about humor anyway....stick a fork in it, Lorne.
Ironic that this spin-authored piece claims that NASA was "just about propaganda". Each of the points made here could have been written by a TASS staff writer. Not sure if tendentious, or just ignorant?
"...Nasa (was to) advance american scientific achievements and progress in the face of a scientific juggarnaut (sic) (the Soviets)..." Yes, the Soviets had the lead in space in just about every category one could imagine...in the 1960s. And since then (really, even then) Russia has turned into a barely-first-world country?
"... almost every commercial satellite, from Iridium to XM, has been launched by a former soviet launch site...(and/or on Soviet/Russian hardware)" This would be because NASA has been nearly SHUT DOWN since the Columbia crash in 2003.
To compare US (private) space business to Russia's is laughable. Why does Russia even have a allegedly-commercial launch system? Because the Russian government imploded and some opportunist pretty much found it sitting there with the keys in it. This wasn't a "policy choice" any more than a car crash is. The reason the Russian system is commercialized is because IT HAD TO BE to continue functioning.
Arguably, such would be a healthier future for NASA as well (privatization). But it's one thing to completely inherit a space program cost-free, and another thing to build one from scratch.
To point out the health of the Soviet/Russian launch organizations today vs NASA is as shallow (and misleading) as asking "why are all the German factories and infrastructure so much newer than the US's?". I'm not sure a lot of people would argue that what Germany went through in 1945 was worth it to have a more advanced industrial infrastructure today?
I wouldn't even disagree with some of your criticisms that NASA is overpolitical, schizoid, and overexpensive (although the "Jesus" comment is...bizarre?). Then again, I'd ask how many Russian programs have gone past Earth orbit lately? Meanwhile a massive, magnificent orbiter continues to generate terrific data from Saturn, probes are all over, and NASA rovers are trundling all over and above Mars. Heck, a US-private launched satellite is leaving an entirely new launch site in Virginia headed for the moon this week.
50 years ago THE SOVIETS 'did science'. 40-30-20-10 they were busy trying not to become a 3rd world country. Congrats? Your mom certainly used to be the prettiest decades ago, but now she just invites strange men to stay overnight so she can pay the electrical bill.
So wait, warming is allowing "pests" (ie creatures we don't like) to spread and flourish, while reducing/eliminating the ranges for the "beloved" creatures (like corals and polar bears). Never, apparently, helping the spread of beneficial or favored animals or confining/killing things we don't like?
That's rather amazing synchronicity, don't you think?
The only possible conclusion is that there is, in fact, a God and he hates us........or, the mendacious reporting of "Global Warming" news concentrates solely on "sky is falling" terrible things and cheerfully fails to report any consequence that might be perceived as positive.
I'd say this exact same lesson - let small bad things happen at a natural rate according to natural processes - is worth reviewing in terms of the economy in an (allegedly) capitalist society.
Businesses fail. New businesses are born. That's how it works. One cannot protect business from failure, and anything that's supposedly 'too big to fail' is PROBABLY the result of skewed former legislation that allowed it to reach sizes/dominance it otherwise naturally wouldn't have.
Just like forest fires...trying to prevent them totally is impossible, and just makes the consequences THAT MUCH WORSE in the end.
Wait, so you're saying that if I go into the rarified field of theoretical particle physics, it's going to be hard to find a job? Crazy! I'm going to change my degree to Historical Russian Literature, that's much more market-attractive in an everyday sense.
I respect NDT, but AFAIK the man has never accepted a paycheck in his life that wasn't from academia or a government entity. That doesn't condemn his intelligence, it just means that I doubt he understands entrepreneurial, risk-taking spirit to any substantial degree.
I'm not some space-libertarian that believes we're going to launch space miners from every garage. Of course not.
But one would have to look at the sweeping course of history and acknowledge that the power of the individual is almost ceaselessly increasing.
Yes, I'm aware that the voyages of Columbus, Magellan, etc were 'government-sponsored'. Clearly there's a role for 'big pockets' of government. But note that many of such explorations were indeed (MERELY) 'sponsored' by government. Many of the American colonies were PRIVATE chartered companies only partly subsidized by government.
The governments HAVE already done most of the heavy-lifting here in their space programs, remote-sensing systems, and proof-of-concept work.
I too believe we're on the cusp of this turning from government only, to a government-backed but private-investor-driven model.
And as one post suggested: "there's no profit in space"... a single reasonably-sized asteroid of the right type would include more iron than has been mined in all of human history. Oh, and the first one to get up there and exploit it will be the one the GOVERNMENTS come to when they inevitably want/need to build significant structures outside our gravity well. How much will THAT monopoly be worth? (Not to mention being famous forever through human history, which is arguably a bigger prize than simple dollars to these guys.)
Agreed. Take advantage of systems that have had hundreds of millions of years of evolution, rather than base it on human codes and rules that - intrinsically - are irrelevant to the "world" of autonomous vehicles.
Certainly, there will have to be some concession to human norms, as these vehicles will share the road with human-driven vehicles for a long, long time.
Nevertheless, count me as one of the people who feel that despite an almost-certainly-painful teething period, computer-controlled cars will be both safer and MUCH more efficient managers of our horrendously-clogged traffic systems. Plus, I so much want to read a book while I wait to get to work, than watch some dumbass driving in bumper-bumper traffic while he's texting his g/f and reading a newspaper.
"...And I'll tell you this people. The world is starting to get sick (and I'm not talking about European puppet Governments, rather.. the people) of American war mongering, so better keep out of it and deal with your problems instead of going around bombing countries and interfering in other countries business."
FWIW, so are we. BELIEVE ME, we're getting sick of it too. Remember how we voted for "change"? Hahahahahahah....oh wait, I'm crying now.
Slashdot Mirror
While most of your post is perfectly reasonable, I'd take issue with this bit:
"...My commercial choices don't "make" Hollywood, or other people, anything. People are dumb now, have been in the future, and always will be. Most of the "most popular" shows / movies, I've never seen in my life.
And, yes, everything "we" do is fucked up. That's why it takes the few who SEE that to come along and fix it - for themselves at first, and others later..."
First: So you don't watch movies? You don't pay your money to rent a dvd or go to a theater? Because if you don't think your dollars (or pounds, or euros, or whatever) are a method of 'voting', you're sadly mistaken. Studios are profit-making entities, seeking the largest profit for the least effort possible: your 'votes' tell them where that profit is. Your commercial choices most certainly do have a (small, proportional) impact.
Your second paragraph is more troubling. The problem is that EITHER something is driven democratically, or it isn't. And if we establish that the bulk of the people are stupid, then we're resigned to either a) bad policies driven by the democratic but bovine masses, or b) non-democratic action, driven by the visionaries that see "what needs to be done, despite what the masses want, for the good of all".
Of course, this latter group isn't necessarily people you agree with, and could be a label applied to 19th century missionaries, eco-terrorists, or George W Bush/Dick Cheney. I could go further, but I don't want to invoke Godwin's Law.
We have EXACTLY the governments we collectively wanted. Their policies reflect, largely, the desires of their masses. The moment some narcissist starts spouting that they "know better than everyone" is the moment I start checking my wallet, my rights, and my rights. The conflict between my personal beliefs and what governments tend to do is why I generally believe in WEAKER centralized power...but again, I'm outvoted by the collective around me who prefers a society ringed with safety nets.
"...if the civil rights movement picks him as a symbol, it will only hurt their cause..."
That's rarely stopped them.
Malcom X
Black Panthers
Al Sharpton
Jesse Jackson
Tawana Brawley
OJ Simpson
Crystal Gail Mangum
Seriously, the race card seems to be at the top of the deck, and the first one played (along with the victim card) in any conceivable circumstance. Which of course then cheapens ACTUAL incidences of racism, and makes people generally more skeptical and less likely to care.
Superficial utopianism, ahoy!
"The government" broke it, and "we" have to fix it, eh?
Remember, WE are the ones that elected this government, and all the previous ones. (And don't give me the crap about "all they give us is fake choices - this system is an evolution of what we've asked for...)
Remember, WE are the ones who vote in such elections at a what, sub-50% rate?
Remember, WE are the ones who, through our commercial choices have made Hollywood and television the engine of derivative, repetitive, simplistic, stupid entertainments.
I don't know about you, but just about everything "we" do is pretty fucked up. The odds that something positive is accomplished by a herd of humans is approximately 1/(2^(# of people involved)).
Personally, I'm finding Mr Schneier less practically relevant and more of an attention-whore every year.
As long as another is named Zimmerman.
If I did, what would indolent pedants have to post about?
Or are you asserting that the difference between a tenth of a percent, and a hundredth, a thousandth, and/or a ten-thousandth MATERIALLY affects the point I was making?
At least the first 6 posts here said "OMG, they wanted all this information to show me my data!"...
Well, geniuses, considering that both Miller's article and the original NY Times article said "....Having filled out an identity verification form that asked for his name, birth date, address and the last four digits of his Social Security number..." personally, I wasn't terribly surprised that they asked for my name, birth date, address and the last four digits of my Social Security number.
Secondly, while I certainly agree that whatever you put into that form ends up going into their database as well, I'd like to pose a stupid question: how ELSE are they going to identify the person requesting the data? I mean, if all I had to put in was my name, then ANYONE could get the data they're about to show me, right? Personally, I strongly suspect that this is more to protect their assets from competitive gathering (after all, data is their business), but one could charitably interpret that this is a REASONABLE step to keep the information they have away from casually-prying eyes that are not the person indicated.
FWIW, it said my information was invalid, and I'd have to be manually identified (and this is all with absolutely correct entries). The second time I tried, it said there's already a user with that email. So, clearly a beta.
And a note to Ron: with a 5-minute scan of your "about Ron Miller" and a listing of articles, I can tell your probable politics - you're an Apple consumer, after all. FYI the fact that you *assert* you don't affiliate with a party also tells me volumes; it doesn't ipso facto mean that you don't in FACT align with a given party, either. And re your question, I guess I'd take the opposite view: while I know by correcting the information, I'm enhancing the value of their product, I'm going to get ads all the time anyway so I'd rather they be relevant.
Of course if they were all being WASTED by some giant space-cannon from a single galactic source, that might be a reason they're all aligned similarly too...but none of the astronomers will talk about THAT, will they?
The fact is, for the western world, risk is largely eliminated. Plague, famine, pestilence, and war - all are pretty nonexistent in the civilized world.
We evolved to deal with immediate, natural risk.
I'd suspect that the human brain is rather good at this in the aggregate - witness, for example, the breadth of 'home remedies' or natural herbs etc that have been determined to actually have some sort of core chemical that (surprising to scientists) actually DOES have a beneficial effect.
So now we're reduced to worry, more than risk-management.
Rather than facing starvation, we worry that we're eating too much.
Rather than facing working day and night to barely survive, we worry that we're too sedentary.
Rather than face the constant risk of agonizing death from the billions of germs trying to kill us like Typhus and Diptheria, we worry that there *might* be a vanishingly small cumulative risk of cancer from the additives that make our food safe from spoilage, mold, etc.
Rather than facing the imminent pillage, rape, or murder by a neighbor village that's decided we have something they want, we worry that there might be some crazy zealot somewhere who might harbor some resentment vaguely against our society.
Seriously, I suspect that worry is endemic to the human creature. If we don't have actual things to be concerned about, we invent / inflate them to fill that psychological space.
Oh, and Cracked has a wonderful article on this: http://www.cracked.com/blog/7-reasons-news-looks-worse-than-it-really-is/
America's cup is watched by millions....barely.
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2013/08/21/tiny-audience-for-americas-cup-tv.html
The semifinals are averaging 50-80,000 viewers.
The races just off San Francisco with the most effete/trendy/hipster crowd imaginable, averaged 800-900,000.
This is somewhere around the ratings received by NBC's "Last Call" at midnight.
This is a marginal sport irrelevant to 99.9999% of the population, and in which the only participants are giant conglomerates or kajillionaires. Granted, formula one racing, etc are likewise only for the big-money teams, but pretty much everyone drives. Sailing as a regular activity is already a marginal sport performed only by the tiniest rind of enthusiasts, that 'pro sailing' is like the margin of the margin of the margin. I don't doubt that it takes tremendous ability, intelligence, and teamwork. It's just that the bulk of us can neither see it nor appreciate it if we could.
Missing the point, stoner Dave.
The point is that - at least according to news reports - the only thing that Global Warming does is BAD things, when in reality for every species LOSING some of its range, another species is GAINING range. And it's logically not just "good" animals dying and "bad" animals thriving - that's just inane.
My point is that yes, if all you're looking to report is that the sky is falling, that's all you're going to see.
And you don't think Tina Fey's parody was politically motivated?
Yes, SNL parodies both sides of the fence, but only barely and much of the mockery of Democrats seems motivated more by the Fairness Doctrine than by humor.
In honesty, not much in the last decade of SNL could be claimed to be about humor anyway....stick a fork in it, Lorne.
Yes, they were 2nd world, and desperately trying not to become the economic equivalent to Mozambique, Libera, or Bangladesh.
Ironic that this spin-authored piece claims that NASA was "just about propaganda".
Each of the points made here could have been written by a TASS staff writer. Not sure if tendentious, or just ignorant?
"...Nasa (was to) advance american scientific achievements and progress in the face of a scientific juggarnaut (sic) (the Soviets)..." Yes, the Soviets had the lead in space in just about every category one could imagine...in the 1960s. And since then (really, even then) Russia has turned into a barely-first-world country?
"... almost every commercial satellite, from Iridium to XM, has been launched by a former soviet launch site...(and/or on Soviet/Russian hardware)" This would be because NASA has been nearly SHUT DOWN since the Columbia crash in 2003.
To compare US (private) space business to Russia's is laughable. Why does Russia even have a allegedly-commercial launch system? Because the Russian government imploded and some opportunist pretty much found it sitting there with the keys in it. This wasn't a "policy choice" any more than a car crash is. The reason the Russian system is commercialized is because IT HAD TO BE to continue functioning.
Arguably, such would be a healthier future for NASA as well (privatization). But it's one thing to completely inherit a space program cost-free, and another thing to build one from scratch.
To point out the health of the Soviet/Russian launch organizations today vs NASA is as shallow (and misleading) as asking "why are all the German factories and infrastructure so much newer than the US's?". I'm not sure a lot of people would argue that what Germany went through in 1945 was worth it to have a more advanced industrial infrastructure today?
I wouldn't even disagree with some of your criticisms that NASA is overpolitical, schizoid, and overexpensive (although the "Jesus" comment is...bizarre?). Then again, I'd ask how many Russian programs have gone past Earth orbit lately? Meanwhile a massive, magnificent orbiter continues to generate terrific data from Saturn, probes are all over, and NASA rovers are trundling all over and above Mars. Heck, a US-private launched satellite is leaving an entirely new launch site in Virginia headed for the moon this week.
50 years ago THE SOVIETS 'did science'. 40-30-20-10 they were busy trying not to become a 3rd world country. Congrats? Your mom certainly used to be the prettiest decades ago, but now she just invites strange men to stay overnight so she can pay the electrical bill.
So wait, warming is allowing "pests" (ie creatures we don't like) to spread and flourish, while reducing/eliminating the ranges for the "beloved" creatures (like corals and polar bears). Never, apparently, helping the spread of beneficial or favored animals or confining/killing things we don't like?
That's rather amazing synchronicity, don't you think?
The only possible conclusion is that there is, in fact, a God and he hates us.... ....or, the mendacious reporting of "Global Warming" news concentrates solely on "sky is falling" terrible things and cheerfully fails to report any consequence that might be perceived as positive.
You pick.
I'd say this exact same lesson - let small bad things happen at a natural rate according to natural processes - is worth reviewing in terms of the economy in an (allegedly) capitalist society.
Businesses fail. New businesses are born. That's how it works.
One cannot protect business from failure, and anything that's supposedly 'too big to fail' is PROBABLY the result of skewed former legislation that allowed it to reach sizes/dominance it otherwise naturally wouldn't have.
Just like forest fires...trying to prevent them totally is impossible, and just makes the consequences THAT MUCH WORSE in the end.
Wait, so you're saying that if I go into the rarified field of theoretical particle physics, it's going to be hard to find a job? Crazy! I'm going to change my degree to Historical Russian Literature, that's much more market-attractive in an everyday sense.
Agreed. You thought of BP, I thought of perhaps the CEO of Goldman Sachs, GM, and AIG.
I respect NDT, but AFAIK the man has never accepted a paycheck in his life that wasn't from academia or a government entity. That doesn't condemn his intelligence, it just means that I doubt he understands entrepreneurial, risk-taking spirit to any substantial degree.
I'm not some space-libertarian that believes we're going to launch space miners from every garage. Of course not.
But one would have to look at the sweeping course of history and acknowledge that the power of the individual is almost ceaselessly increasing.
Yes, I'm aware that the voyages of Columbus, Magellan, etc were 'government-sponsored'. Clearly there's a role for 'big pockets' of government. But note that many of such explorations were indeed (MERELY) 'sponsored' by government. Many of the American colonies were PRIVATE chartered companies only partly subsidized by government.
The governments HAVE already done most of the heavy-lifting here in their space programs, remote-sensing systems, and proof-of-concept work.
I too believe we're on the cusp of this turning from government only, to a government-backed but private-investor-driven model.
And as one post suggested: "there's no profit in space"... a single reasonably-sized asteroid of the right type would include more iron than has been mined in all of human history. Oh, and the first one to get up there and exploit it will be the one the GOVERNMENTS come to when they inevitably want/need to build significant structures outside our gravity well. How much will THAT monopoly be worth? (Not to mention being famous forever through human history, which is arguably a bigger prize than simple dollars to these guys.)
Agreed. Take advantage of systems that have had hundreds of millions of years of evolution, rather than base it on human codes and rules that - intrinsically - are irrelevant to the "world" of autonomous vehicles.
Certainly, there will have to be some concession to human norms, as these vehicles will share the road with human-driven vehicles for a long, long time.
Nevertheless, count me as one of the people who feel that despite an almost-certainly-painful teething period, computer-controlled cars will be both safer and MUCH more efficient managers of our horrendously-clogged traffic systems. Plus, I so much want to read a book while I wait to get to work, than watch some dumbass driving in bumper-bumper traffic while he's texting his g/f and reading a newspaper.
Wait, a nutball wondering why we don't all take Global Warming more seriously?
How...ironic.
...clearly, this has MAJOR applications for the porn industry.
Holy smokes.
Is this starting to sound like "Science as religion" to anyone else?
I mean, science as a METHOD is brilliant and irrefutable; hypothesis, test, prove/disprove, repeat.
But there seems to have a been a cascade of quackery articles talking more about "science" as a CREED than science.
And that is a huge mistake. ANYTHING can become dogma. Anything.
"...And I'll tell you this people. The world is starting to get sick (and I'm not talking about European puppet Governments, rather.. the people) of American war mongering, so better keep out of it and deal with your problems instead of going around bombing countries and interfering in other countries business."
FWIW, so are we. BELIEVE ME, we're getting sick of it too. Remember how we voted for "change"? Hahahahahahah....oh wait, I'm crying now.
(Signed, the American People)
Attention-whores are attention-whores. They get mocked all the time for things they didn't say, but which fits their 'meme'.
cf: Palin's "I can see Russia from my house."
What surprises me is ... the surprise.
Seriously, what do you guys think spy agencies DO?
The moment you say "well, THAT's off-limits", then if I were a bad guy, I'd be quite the idiot not to use that method to communicate.
It's like you morons think there are RULES or something?